[olug] Physical limits of CD Rom

[Cale Lewis]

> Find a IBM P/N 27L4351 laptop DVD-ROM drive on eBay.  I can personally 
> attest to these, as one was in my work laptop (IBM ThinkPad A30p) that I 
> beat the holy snot out of.  I'd suspect it took bigger drops than that at 
> more often of a frequency than you are looking at :).
> 
It's a good drive. I have been using laptop drives I got off eBay inseveral 
mod projects and the drives out of the IBM laptops have been consistantly 
good quality drives, although I can't say much for the care and treatment 
some of them have recieved in the past.

If you're building, why not utilise USB externals where needed and a Compact 
Flash Drive Adapter on IDE? The USB will take about anything and CF cards are 
smaller and travel better than CD's in most cases.

> I'm making a (tool-box machine) with knoppix running off of cd rom. What 
I'd 

I've got a small distro called "Recovery is Possible" on CF and use it thru 
CF-IDE and PC card adapters.   
http://www.tux.org/pub/people/kent-robotti/looplinux/rip/

They describe it better than I can-
Recovery Is Possible (RIP) is a CD or floppy boot/rescue/backup/maintenance 
system. It has support for a lot of filesystem types (Reiserfs, Reiser4, 
ext2/3, iso9660, UDF, XFS, JFS, UFS, HPFS, HFS, MINIX, MS DOS, NTFS, UMSDOS, 
and VFAT) and contains a bunch of utilities for system recovery. It also has 
PCMCIA, RAID, LVM2, and Ethernet/DSL/cable/PPP/PPPOE network support.
 
It does more than I need, but it's nice to know that if the need 
arises.........

Cale Lewis