Re: Linux and CDRW

[Jeff Licquia <jeff@licquia.org>]

On Mon, 2002-05-13 at 23:10, Tim McDonough wrote:
> Newbie question... What document do I look for that will explain how 
> to tell Redhat 7.2 to recognize my Plextor IDE CD-RW as a CD-RW and 
> not just a plain CD-ROM?

I believe there's a HOWTO on the subject; see linuxdoc.org or the LUCI
mirror at www.luci.org/LDP.

However, I'm almost positive I can tell you what your problem is.  On
Linux (at the present, anyway), you can only burn CDs on SCSI devices,
as the kernel bus interface doesn't provide the necessary control for
IDE.

There is a driver in the kernel called "ide-scsi"; this driver will
cause devices on the IDE bus to be treated as if they were SCSI
devices.  Tell the kernel to use this driver to talk to the CD-RW, and
then load the SCSI CD module.  At that point, "cdrecord -scanbus" should
report your CD-RW, and you should be able to burn to it.

The easiest way to tell the kernel to use ide-scsi is to add to the
kernel command line.  You want to give it an option like
"hd<x>=ide-scsi", where "hd<x>" is the IDE device node for your CD-RW. 
For example, if your CD-RW is normally on /dev/hdc, you would pass
"hdc=ide-scsi" to the kernel.

If it doesn't work right away, try "modprobe ide-scsi" and try again. 
If it still doesn't work, make sure your kernel has IDE-SCSI support and
SCSI CD support.  (Look in your kernel config file for
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDESCSI for the former.)

Shameless plug: If you use Debian 3.0, do "apt-get install discover". 
If ide-cdrom and ide-scsi are both modules, then discover will take care
of all the details for you, and things will "just work".  If ide-cdrom
is compiled into the kernel, add the "hd<x>=ide-scsi" kernel parameter,
and discover will do the rest.  If it doesn't work right for you, just
let me know; I'm one of the authors of discover.


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