CD writers - advice sought

[Rasjid Wilcox]

On Tue, 8 Jan 2002 06:37, Felix Karpfen wrote:
> I am currently investigating my options when upgrading my box (Cyrix
> 233MHz - running RedHat 7.1) to include a CD writer and have found the
> following advice (plus details on the available makes):
>
> You can safely assume that most newer IDE/ATAPI- and SCSI-writers work
> under Linux. Newer drives are mostly MMC-compliant and are therefore
> supported.
>
> I have an operational IDE/ATAPI CD-ROM drive at the moment and my only
> envisaged use for a CD writer is to make backups of the material on my
> box in case, through stupidity or misfortune, I manage to wipe out the
> contents of my hard drive.

Once you get one you will use it for other things, even if it is just burning 
copies of Linux for you friends.  :-)

>
> I am advised that the current flavour of the month for CD writers is
> `Mitsubishi'.

I'm very happy with my HP 9100(i?), but I got that over a year ago and I'm 
sure things have changed a lot since then.

>
> Any additional pointers will be welcome.

A note on configuration.  You need to tell the kernel to use ide-scsi 
emulation, passed as a kernel paramater at boot time via lilo/grub etc.  eg, 
mine says 'hdc=ide-scsi'.  However, from memory, if both your cd-rom and 
cd-writer are on the same ide channel, it will use ide-scsi emulation on 
both, meaning you will need to re-link /dev/cdrom to /dev/scd# where # is 0,1 
etc.  At least, this was true for me with the 2.2 kernel, and I assume it 
still holds true under 2.4.  My cd-writer now has an ide channel all to 
itself, so I can't check.

The simple soultion is to do the same - put your cdrom on one channel, and 
your cdrom on the other.  In fact, this is probably a good idea anyway, as 
the only useless CDs I can remember burning was when I had my cdrom and 
cdwriter on the one ide channel and tried to access my cdrom while I was 
writing.

Anyway, just my 2c.

Rasjid.