Hello from a lurker to the mailing list,

Well it has been about 6 mos now and I am no closer to a solution for
ioctl errors. I believe this type of error must be rare because there
are not many write ups on this error and hardly anyone replies to
questions about it. About the only response I have ever received was
someone here once said that the error may be caused by hardware
problems. That seemed viable because at the time I had a hard drive that
was slowly dying (the drive media was slowly degrading). Well I have a
nice new 100 gig drive now and wham. I got the error again the other
day.

Here is what happened. I added the emu10k1 modules into the kernel for
sound on my SB-PCI512 card. When I did this I also edited
/etc/rc.modules to load the modules at system startup. I also removed
SLIP from the load list because I don't use any SLIP connections, just
PPP. Everything looked good to this point so I rebooted to see how
everything would work. No errors occurred so I logged on and ran dmesg
to be sure. Everything looked good still. So I logged in as SU and tried
to run pppd.

That is where the IOCTL error pops up. It looks like the kernel doesn't
see that PPP is compiled in. The only thing I could think of is that
SLIP is somehow tied to the PPP modules. So I went into /etc/rc.modules
and added SLIP back in. Rebooted and tried pppd. Same thing, IOCTL
error.

At this point I tried to load up the original unchanged kernel and
/etc/rc.modules file (yeah I kept them around just in case.) I rebooted
and tried to run pppd again. Same problem. So I dropped into the kernel
menu and checked to make sure PPP and SLIP were in there. They were. I
ran lsmod and the modules looked like they were running. I even tried
rmmod and then tried to reinstall the PPP and SLIP modules. Still no
dice.

At this point I ran depmod and a whole bunch of stuff was broken. My
patience was wearing thin and since this was a clean install I just went
ahead and reinstalled Linux again. That fixed the error. I pulled up the
emu10k1 modules ok and they load and run just fine with ppp now. The
only difference is that this time I didn't dork with SLIP.

Does anyone have a idea as to the cause of this error and how to fix it?



Also any ideas on how to approach making backups to my HP CD-Writer or
just writing to it in general? It reads disks just fine but I would like
to be able to burn some cd's.

Thanks,
Craig S.