Easy Addition of an IDE CD-writer to a Modern Linux Distribution.

Easy Addition of an IDE CD-Writer to a Linux/Redhat PC.

With these instructions (or these you can write CD-ROMS without a kernel rebuild, or other advanced procedures. The CD-Writing HOWTO at http://www.guug.de/~winni/linux/and the official cdrecord site at www.fokus.gmd.de/research/cc/glone/employees/joerg.schilling/private/cdrecord.html offer a great deal more information about installing and using CD-ROM writers. Certainly much more than you need to know for an ordinary Linux installation. If you don't want to support an obsolete drive, or an older kernel, or VAX VMS, then you probably don't need to recompile the kernel or make any devices (See Martinez's Dispelling the Kernel Compiling Myth). This short document should be sufficient to get you started burning disks. Once you are started, the official documents will guide you to such esoterica as audio, bootable, multisession and hybrid disks. My original testing was done with RedHat 6.1. After determining that no kernel modification were required, I tried setting up several other distributions, including RedHat 6.0, SUSE 6.1, Debian 2.1, and Storm 2000. All of those were slightly harder because they didn't include a recent version of cdrecord but none required a kernel rebuild, I have noted the differences along the way. I have since tried Redhat 7.0 which also works. I have heard that Mandrake 7.1 installer tries to do the install for you will work but gets the symbolic link from /dev/scd0 to cdrom wrong, according to the Mandrake web site). My experience with Redhat 7.2 is that it will automatically recognize an IDE CDR device and you can skip directly to the section on cdrecord below. Rumour has it that any Linux based on kernel 2.1.73 or better will conform to these instructions.

You will need to have:

a supported IDE drive,
a Linux kernel that supports loadable device drivers,
use LILO to boot. (Default for most distributions).
cdrecord 1.8 or better (included with RedHat 6.1 or better).

I believe any drives you bought in a store recently will qualify. The cdrecord docs say that all 1999 or later ATAPI drives support MMC, which is sufficient. Many earlier drives are suppoted also. A look on the shelves at the local computer superstore did not turn up any that mentioned MMC or Linux on the box. My first installation used an older Richoh MP6200A cd recorder. I did more installations with the MagicWriter 4X4X24. This is a very cheap drive, but the manual had a 1999 copyright date and it did work as I expected.

Physical Installation

Perform the physical installation of the new drive just as you would any ide drive. It can replace your original read-only drive or be added on. Make sure the drive jumper is set for master or slave as required, the power cable is connected and the data cable has the correct orientation. You shouldn't have to do any CMOS setup. I am told that keeping the cd-writer on a different cable from the hard drive speeds data transfers, but this is probably not significant with Pentium class machines.

At this point stop to check if the BIOS mentions the drive during BIOS initialization. Not all BIOS do that, but especially if it doesn't, you might want to check the cables and the Master/slave jumpers on both the CD-writer and any other drive on the same cable. The /var/log/messages file should have a line about the new "ATAPI" drive which will tell you what device name it has been assigned.

SCSI Emulation Setup

Find out the name of the physical CD-ROM device. This is probably /dev/hdc (the master device on the second IDE cable) but could be /dev/hdb (slave device on the primary IDE cable or /dev/hdd (slave device on the secondary cable). The following will probably inform you:
Become root.
To control an IDE CD-R drive, your kernel needs to load the ide-scsi emulation driver. You can check for its availability or presence in your configuration with the command:
Insmod will respond with 'Using ...' if the driver is available. If it isn't available, the instructions here are not suitable for you - you need to upgrade your OS. But in the more likely case make sure that the following alias is defined in /etc/modules.conf, (or /etc/conf.modules for kernels before about 2.2.15):
If you don't have a modules.conf, you can try creating one, but if that doesn't work, you can add the following command to your /etc/rc.local or otherwise ensure that it gets executed after each boot:
Add the following line to your /etc/lilo.conf file: where "hdc" might be "hdb" or "hdd" depending on where your drive is installed. This line should be inserted just after the image statement that boots Linux on your computer. This instructs the kernel to access the cd-writer via the scsi emulation driver. [While I am not familiar with the Grub bootloader, there is a letter included below from someone with instructions for it.]
Reconfigure LILO by running the following command at the Unix shell prompt:
Reboot. Become root. Check that ide-scsi is loaded by repeating the insmod command above. If it is, you are ready to install the application software.
You need to ``install'' cdrecord and mkisofs. Version 1.8.1 of cdrecord is on the RedHat disk in an rpm file. As I write this the latest version is 1.91, but the main reason for obtaining the latest version would be that the version you have doesn't support your drive. Here are the commands for the software installation with RedHat. The other distributions either included an older version of cdrecord (1.6) which did not support my recorders, or did not include cdrecord at all. If want to get the most recent rpm, it can be found at http://speakeasy.rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=cdrecord , where you want to select "cdrecord-N.NNi386.html". For distributions not using the RPM format, a tarball of the most recent cdrecord is available at ftp://ftp.fokus.gmd.de/pub/unix/cdrecord/cdrecord.tar.gz I note that the very extensive cdrecord instructions cover many operating systems, not just Linux (or even Unix). For the distributions considered here, all you need to do is: The cdrecord tarball includes mkisofs. If the packages get installed to /opt/shilly/bin you probably want to move them to /usr/local/bin so that they will be in the default path. Better yet, create symbolic links:
A very nice feature of cdrecord is that it auto-detects the drive characteristics at run time so there isn't any configuration and you can replace or upgrade the drive without getting into trouble.
If you want to read with the recorder, you will need to add or modify the appropriate line in /etc/fstab so that the drive is addressed through the ide-scsi interface. The following worked for me, but the device name may not be correct for all distributions (/dev/sg0 and /dev/hdc are likely alternatives), and in any case reading is beyond the scope of this document. Additional information about reading is contained in a letter from Bruce Ward, below.
To let any user read from the CD, you have to set the permissions correctly on /dev/scd0:
Reboot the machine. Become root a third time. The installation is complete. My impression is that if you did anything wrong, there won't be any error messages, so go back and check the spelling of the changes listed above before proceeding to actually testing your work.
Now you get to check the hardware, OS and application installation together. Try: One of the output lines should mention a Removable CD-ROM, and maybe even indicate ``-R'' or ``RW'' to indicate that it is a recorder. Something like this: Only the digit triple at the start is significant. It indicates controller, SCSI ID, and LUN, and is likely to be all zeroes, as shown with SCSI emulation. With two CD drives, the middle number might be a '1'. The only error message I saw in my experiments combined the cases of (1) scsi emulation not correctly installed and (2) drive not found or supported. At that point you might try getting reading to work as an IDE drive in Windows, then in Linux as IDE, then in Linux with SCSI emulation, before concluding that the drive was not supported or broken. I often find this systematic approach to hardware debugging slow but sure.

Writing Disks

Writing disks is normally a two step process. First the ISO filesystem (a bit-for-bit image of the CD to be recorded) is created on your hard disk: where file.iso is your output file and file... is the list of files and directories you want on the cd-rom. If you just list a single directory, the structure is maintained on the CD. Otherwise all the files and subdirectory files are dropped into the root directory with no subdirectory structure. There are a lot of options described in the man page. If you keep your filenames to 8.3 lower case, you won't need to be bothered with most of them. The "-J" option (for Joliet) will allow longer Windows style filenames, but if you actually use longer or case sensitive names your file names will look funny or not work in a minimal ISO9660 system.

Then you actually burn the cd-rom: cdrecord -v dev=0,0,0 file.iso

The ``dev=0,0,0'' specifies the output device, and might be possibly be different on your system, check the cdrecord -scanbus output if in doubt. Because cdrecord wants to lock pages in memory, it has to be run as root. Making cdrecord setuserid root is endorsed by the Shilly's documentation. Then non-root users can burn cds. If your cdrecord binary is still in the default location, this will make it 'suid root':

chmod +s /usr/opt/shilly/cdrecord

But watch out, some distributions seem to have cron jobs that will undo this periodically, depending on the security level chosen at the original installation of Linux.

On my 1997 vintage 233mHz AMD with a 5400 rpm hard disk, and a quad speed CD-ROM writer, the system had no trouble maintaining speed and the 512K buffer was never less than 97% full. After initial success you might try combining the mkisofs and cdrecord steps:

mkisofs file... | cdrecord -v dev=0,0,0 - where the hyphen indicates to cdrecord that it should take its input from the standard input. This worked on my system, even when the files were NFS mounted (on a 100BaseTX connection). Another interesting advanced topic is making your own bootable Linux distribution. That is covered in http://linuxgazette.com/issue50/nielsen2.html

Any corrections or suggestions should be sent to me. I am particularly interested in hearing which distributions will work with these minimal instructions and any variations. I don't want to encroach on existing documentation by covering enhanced capabilities - that is well handled already by the existing documentation. This page is kept at http://www.nber.org/cdrecord.html in the directory.

feenberg _@_ nber.org
3 May 2001

Comments from Readers

This is a seelction of comments from readers of this document. Since I make changes frequently, comments on the text may be out of date.

Date: Fri, 10 Nov 2000 09:45:18 +0100
From: Gerrit Heeres <_______ _@_ dds.nl>
To: feenberg _@_ nber.org
Subject: IDE CD-writer

Hello Daniel,

On your "Easy addition of an IDE CD-writer to a Linux/Redhat PC" page you
wrote you're interested in results and variations.

I installed Redhat 7.0 on a 200 MHz Pentium pc, which already had a cd
player and a cd writer (Philips CDD3610) on board. They are on the secondary
ide controller with the recorder as slave.

A few things are different from your description.

1. I did _not_ need to add the append line to the lilo.conf file. Everything
works fine without it.  [This is contradicted below - drf]
2. I had to modify the lines for _both_ cdrom drives in fstab, otherwise
they could not be mounted. I changed:

/dev/cdrom     /mnt/cdrom     iso9660 noauto,owner,ro 0 0
/dev/cdrom1    /mnt/cdrom1    iso9660 noauto,owner,ro 0 0

to:

/dev/scd0      /mnt/cdrom     iso9660 noauto,owner,ro 0 0
/dev/scd1      /mnt/cdrom1    iso9660 noauto,owner,ro 0 0

I started with an append-command in lilo.conf for /dev/hdd (the recorder),
and found that "cdrecord -scanbus" reported both drives. That's what made me
try to work without the append command. If the system can see one drive that
isn't in the append it may be able to see both without the append. And it
worked.

It took me about 2 1/2 hours to get everything to work. Not bad, your
instructions were very helpful. Thanks for making them.

Regards,

Gerrit Heeres

From ewhodges _@_ greytrout.com Sat Jan  6 09:26:11 2001
Date: Thu, 04 Jan 2001 20:53:45 -0500
From: Buck Hodges 
To: feenberg _@_ nber.org
Subject: Thanks for your CD-Writing article

Daniel,

Your CD-Writing article on LinuxGazette helped me get mine working.  Thanks for
writing it.

I have an Iomega Zip drive too and after setting up the CD-Writer, the ide-scsi
emulation grabbed the Zip drive also.  The Zip drive wouldn't work with it. 
With the append line written as
    append="hdd=ide-scsi hdb=ide-floppy"   # for CD-Writer stuff (see HOWTO)
in lilo.conf, the Zip drive was back to being treated like a normal IDE
device.  I'm guessing the reader with RedHat 7.0 could get his CDROM back to an
IDE device the same way, but of course his drive seems to work fine now.

Thanks for the fine article!

Buck.

-- 
Buck Hodges
GreyTrout Software Inc.
http://www.greytrout.com/

List:     debian-user
Subject:  cdrecord,/dev/pg0 & /usr/include/linux
From:     John Carter 
Date:     1999-03-18 9:27:10
[Download message RAW]

Greetings Debi-one's,

Are you trying to compile the "cdrecord" or some other thing that
makes use of the "pg" driver?

Are you having no joy? Does the  _@_ #%$%$! cdrecord merely say "Cannot
open SCSI" and then exit?

Are you losing your hair by the fistful whilst you beat upon your
breast and keyboard with equal ferocity?

Have you upgraded both kernel and cdrecord without reward?

Cry no more.

cd /usr/include
ls -ld linux
drwxr-xr-x   2 root     root         2048 Oct 10 17:13 linux

Note that 'd' in the first column. It is your enemy. 

Debian hamm (and maybe others) didn't distribute the kernel source. So
instead of that being a shambolic link into the kernel source, it is a
standalone directory full of the header files for the linux-2.0.3?
whatever kernel hamm was built around.

Now having upgraded to linux-2.2.3, that standalone directory stands
there alone with a bunch of obsolete header files. "cdrecord" looks in
there, doesn't find pg.h and doesn't build in the ability to talk to
the /dev/pg0.

Solution :-

su
cd /usr/include
rm -rvf linux
ln -s /usr/src/linux/include/linux linux
ls -ld linux
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     root           28 Mar 18 10:40 linux ->
/usr/src/linux/include/linux

Rebuild ab initio cdrecord. Hah! It works!

John Carter                    EMail: ece _@_ dwaf-hri.pwv.gov.za
Telephone : 27-12-808-0374x194 Fax:- 27-12-808-0338
 or 

From dgrayson _@_ home.com Sat Apr  7 07:50:15 2001
Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2001 00:19:54 -0400
From: Donald Grayson 
To: feenberg _@_ nber.org
Subject: ATAPI CD Burner in Linux

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Hi, I successfully got my cd burner working thanks to your article on 
Linuxnewbies.org.  Thanks very much.

System info is -

SuSE 7.1
Kernel 2.4.2
Smart and Friendly 4/4/24 CD Burner

Some small changes, I had to add the line "/sbin/modprobe ide-scsi" to my 
/etc/init.d/boot.local file to get the module loaded after every boot.  I'm 
able to read from the drive as well as write with no problems so far.  Now to 
learn all the commands for mkisofs and cdrecord :)

From ubq7 _@_ rz.uni-karlsruhe.de Wed May  2 21:09:05 2001
Date: Tue, 1 May 2001 15:37:07 +0200
From: Hendrik Sattler 
To: Daniel Feenberg 
Subject: Re: cdrecord

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On Tuesday,  1. May 2001 15:02, you wrote:
> I have posted an introduction to
> cdrecord for linux at
> www.nber.org/cdrecord.html and
> am looking for comments.

1.
you should not advertise loading modules with insmod. use modprobe instead. 
It loads dependent modules, too, so an more automatic setup in 
/etc/modules.conf may be possible, e.g.

	alias char-major-21	sg
	pre-install sg		modprobe -s -k ide-scsi

This way you do not have to load the modules manually. This is far easier to 
handle, once set up. You actually missed the need for the module sg (scsi 
generic support) at all. The same is for scsi cdrom support (char-major-11).

2.
the device should have permission 666 not 777. /dev/scd0 does not have to be 
executable in any way. A better way would be
chown root.users /dev/scd0
chmod 660 /dev/scd0

3.
only very, very old devices are anouncing itself as CD-R or the like. There 
were always problems with this, as far as BIOS and M$ Windows was concerned.

4.
You are wrong about theJoliet file system table. It is an addition to the iso 
file system table and completely independent AFAIK.

5.
Most distributions will set the suid bit off by a cron job because cdrecord 
mostly is in their list as non-suid. This can lead to confusion.

Have fun...

HS
From unruh _@_ physics.ubc.ca Sun May  6 16:56:39 2001
Date: Sun, 6 May 2001 10:31:54 -0700 (PDT)
From: Bill Unruh 
To: Daniel Feenberg 
Subject: Re: CDRECORD and LINUX

On Sun, 6 May 2001, Daniel Feenberg wrote:
> > > I have written a piece explaining how to use an IDE CD-R drive with common
> > > Linux distributions, and am looking for comments. It is at
> > >
> > > http://www.nber.org/cdrecord.html.

On older versions of the kernel ( ie older than something like 2.2.15)
it was /etc/conf.modules, not /etc/modules.conf
Also if there is an entry in /etc/modules.conf, the system should try to
install them automaticaly on bootup.

From danceswithcrows _@_ usa.net Sun Jun 10 06:58:44 2001
Date: 9 Jun 2001 22:53:32 EDT
From: Matt Graham 
To: Daniel Feenberg 
Subject: Re: [cdrecord]

Daniel Feenberg  wrote:
> I just saw your mini-howto, and realize mine may be redundant, or maybe
> not...I think I will keep it up anyway because I enjoy installing
> different versions of Linux. 
> 
> One thing I wonder about is that many messages posted on Usenix suggest
> users add an "ignore hdc" or similar parameter. Since most of the same
> posts tell people that they should recompile the kernel, I don't take it
> too seriously, but still I wonder if it has some purpose. Do you know?

The "ignore hdc" line is for the IDE-CD driver, if said IDE-CD driver is
compiled directly into the kernel.  The IDE-CD driver has a bad habit of
grabbing CD-R? devices and not letting anything else use them.  This makes
it impossible to use CD-RWs without rebooting at the very least.

Windows, has a SCSI emulation layer in place for *all* CD-R? devices. 
Since CD-RWs are getting more common, and the emulation seems to have no
performance penalty, I think that Linux distros should treat all CD-R?
devices as SCSI-emulated by default, and keep the IDE-CD driver around for
weird cases and those who like to hack on things.  But that's just me!

Date: Tue, 28 Aug 2001 12:25:01 -0700
From: Michael_Duane _@_ amat.com
To: feenberg _@_ nber.org, grrthrs _@_ dds.nl
Subject: Thanks for the CD writing help

    [ The following text is in the "iso-8859-1" character set. ]
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Your document, http://www.nber.org/cdrecord.html, was extremely helpful to
me.     A colleague had previously gone through this exercise with RedHat
6.0, but when we repeated the steps with RedHat 7.0, it didn't work.
Gerrit's comments were key.    Like him, I found that I did not need the
append line, and I did need to edit fstab.    Then, as described in the CD
Write Howto, I changed the link for /dev/cdrom from hdc to scd0.   I used
xcdroast as the GUI for cdrecord, and it worked very well.    There is one
thing I did not see online during this exercise, and that is what the
output of 'cdrecord -scanbus' looks like when it works.   Here is an
example:

Cdrecord 1.9 (i686-pc-linux-gnu) Copyright (C) 1995-2000 J�rg Schilling
Linux sg driver version: 2.1.38
Using libscg version 'schily-0.1'
scsibus0:
     0,0,0       0) 'QUANTUM ' 'ATLAS10K2-TY184L' 'DA40' Disk
     0,1,0       1) *
     0,2,0       2) *
     0,3,0       3) *
     0,4,0       4) *
     0,5,0       5) *
     0,6,0       6) *
     0,7,0       7) *
scsibus2:
     2,0,0     200) 'SONY    ' 'CD-RW  CRX140E  ' '1.0n' Removable CD-ROM
     2,1,0     201) *
     2,2,0     202) *
     2,3,0     203) *
     2,4,0     204) *
     2,5,0     205) *
     2,6,0     206) *
     2,7,0     207) *

Michael

From tomg _@_ io.com Sun Sep  9 15:09:30 2001
Date: Sun, 9 Sep 2001 13:45:20 -0500
From: tom georgoulias 
To: feenberg _@_ nber.org
Subject: re: IDE cd burner mini-HOWTO comments

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Daniel:

First of all, thank you for posting the mini HOWTO on getting an IDE CD 
burner set up under Red Hat.  I found it to be the most helpful doc around 
when installing my newly acquired Plextor CDRW.  I also found the reader 
comments section quite useful and thought I'd add some of my own to cover the 
"problem" I had in case someone else runs into it.

I'm running a stock RH7.1 with KDE 2.1 and the CDRW is my only CD drive.  
While Gerrit Heeres' comments are correct in noting that /etc/fstab needs to 
be modified as he stated, neglecting to add the "append" line in 
/etc/lilo.conf (append "hdc=ide-scsi") will always result in two entries 
under /etc/fstab:

/dev/scd0 /mnt/cdrom
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom1

and create two desktop link icons to both devices, named "cdrom" and 
"cdrom1".  Not only did this frustrate me because I had two icons for the 
same device, if I mounted "cdrom1" instead of "cdrom" the device would get 
tied up and I was no longer be able to access it via the ide-scsi module 
until I rebooted.  I was unsuccessful when I tried to circumvent this 
behavior by adding "options ide-cd ignore=hdc" to /etc/modules.conf, so I am 
guessing Red Hat builds the main IDE driver in instead of adding it as a 
module.  Other than this small hiccup, I had no problems whatsoever getting 
the device configured with your instructions.

I hope this is of help to someone else.
-- 
Tom Georgoulias
http://www.io.com/~tomg

From tomg _@_ io.com Mon Sep 10 09:06:06 2001
Date: Sun, 9 Sep 2001 17:30:35 -0500
From: tom georgoulias 
To: Daniel Feenberg 
Subject: Re: IDE cd burner mini-HOWTO comments

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On Sunday 09 September 2001 02:12 pm, you wrote:

> Is fair to summarize your comment as "Feenberg is right"?

Now that you mention it, I guess I am just confirming your initial 
instructions!  ;)  The only thing that I did that isn't included in your text 
is to add this symlink:

ln -s /dev/scd0 /dev/cdrom

Other than that, I think you and I are in agreement about the overall 
procedure.  

> Or is there
> something in the main text of the mini-howto that needs to be changed for
> RH7.1? I would be glad to change it if necessary.

One thing you may want to add to your text write up concerns adding this 
"options ide-cd ignore=hdc" to /etc/modules.conf, a step that is suggested by 
the CD-Writing-HOWTO.  I found a statement in the Linux 2.4 SCSI subsystem 
HOWTO (http://www.torque.net/scsi/SCSI-2.4-HOWTO.html#SRATAPI) that explains 
why this doesn't work under Red Hat and most other distros.  This was helpful 
to me and I'm sure it will be to most other folks as well.
-- 
Tom Georgoulias
http://www.io.com/~tomg

From Michael_Duane _@_ amat.com Tue Aug 28 16:10:37 2001
Date: Tue, 28 Aug 2001 12:25:01 -0700
From: Michael_Duane _@_ amat.com
To: feenberg _@_ nber.org, grrthrs _@_ dds.nl
Subject: Thanks for the CD writing help

    [ The following text is in the "iso-8859-1" character set. ]
    [ Your display is set for the "US-ASCII" character set.  ]
    [ Some characters may be displayed incorrectly. ]

Your document, http://www.nber.org/cdrecord.html, was extremely helpful to
me.     A colleague had previously gone through this exercise with RedHat
6.0, but when we repeated the steps with RedHat 7.0, it didn't work.
Gerrit's comments were key.    Like him, I found that I did not need the
append line, and I did need to edit fstab.    Then, as described in the CD
Write Howto, I changed the link for /dev/cdrom from hdc to scd0.   I used
xcdroast as the GUI for cdrecord, and it worked very well.    There is one
thing I did not see online during this exercise, and that is what the
output of 'cdrecord -scanbus' looks like when it works.   Here is an
example:

Cdrecord 1.9 (i686-pc-linux-gnu) Copyright (C) 1995-2000 J�rg Schilling
Linux sg driver version: 2.1.38
Using libscg version 'schily-0.1'
scsibus0:
     0,0,0       0) 'QUANTUM ' 'ATLAS10K2-TY184L' 'DA40' Disk
     0,1,0       1) *
     0,2,0       2) *
     0,3,0       3) *
     0,4,0       4) *
     0,5,0       5) *
     0,6,0       6) *
     0,7,0       7) *
scsibus2:
     2,0,0     200) 'SONY    ' 'CD-RW  CRX140E  ' '1.0n' Removable CD-ROM
     2,1,0     201) *
     2,2,0     202) *
     2,3,0     203) *
     2,4,0     204) *
     2,5,0     205) *
     2,6,0     206) *
     2,7,0     207) *

Michael

From daveh _@_ cisnet.com Sat Nov 17 22:53:28 2001
Date: Sat, 17 Nov 2001 18:53:13 -0500
From: Dave 
To: Daniel Feenberg 
Subject: Re: Help with cdrecord ...

Thank you for writing. After about a week of research, and shortly after
I sent the initial email to you, I found some information that helped. I
added the following to conf.modules:

alias scd0 srmod
alias scsi_hostadapter ide-scsi
options ide-cd ignore hdb

I added the following to lilo.conf:

append="hdb=ide-scsi"

I then ran lilo and re-booted. At that point cdrecord -scanbus displayed
meaningful information.

I found the above information at:

http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue57/stoddard.html

Again, thank you for responding.

Regards,

Dave Hudach

From John.Randal _@_ vuw.ac.nz Thu May 16 18:07:09 2002
Date: Fri, 17 May 2002 09:48:34 +1200 (NZST)
From: John Randal 
To: feenberg _@_ nber.org
Subject: setting up CD-RW in linux

Dear Daniel,
firstly, thank you for making available your most excellent notes about 
adding an IDE CD-Write to a Linux PC.  I hope you find the following 
comments useful.

I am running RedHat 6.2 on my home PC, and installed a CD-RW two days ago.  
It was detected on boot as an IDE drive and function properly as a 
mountable cdrom.  I followed your notes downloaded 15 May.

1.  grep CDROM /var/log/messages  (missing log/)

2.  I created the file /etc/rc.d/rc.modules, with
#!/binh/sh
/sbin/modprobe ide-scsi

5.  using the command insmod -p ide-scsi which gave the same output as 
before "using ..." it didn't seem helpful, as the first time it wasn't 
loaded, and the second time it was.  

In the writing disks section, the option -r was useful in the mkisofs call
mkisofs -v -r -o file.iso file...

also, the following might be worth mentioning:  root can mount the image:
mount -t iso9660 ro,loop=/dev/loop0 file.iso Mount_point/

which let me check the file structure etc in the image before writing.  

Thanks again for your efforts, and i hope my comments are helpful.  All 
the best
John

-- 

John Randal
School of Economics and Finance
Victoria University of Wellington
NEW ZEALAND

web:    http://www.vuw.ac.nz/~randal/

From dmsantam _@_ it.uts.edu.au Sun Jun 16 07:56:57 2002
Date: Sun, 16 Jun 2002 17:50:20 +1000
From: Daniel Santamaria 
To: feenberg _@_ nber.org
Subject: cd writer addin article

Hi,

just thought i'd let you know that the burner installation works fine 
with Mandrake 8.2

cheers,
|Daniel Santamaria|

From rob.anderson _at_  reawebtech.com Fri Jun 28 09:35:11 2002
Date: Thu, 27 Jun 2002 20:14:30 -0700
From: rob anderson
To: feenberg of nber dot org
Subject: easy addition of an IDE CD-Writer ...

Thanks a lot for the article, I followed the instructions
on redhat 7.0 and it came up fine.

I had to change the append command since I already had
an append. I concatenated the command with a "," and it
worked ( I couldn't find it easily in the LILO doc.)

The mkisofs program was already installed, but the 
cdrecord program was where you said. Pipelining
worked fine.

The only thing is , I saw a core dump at the end of 
cdreccord, not sure why, my system does it 
often anyways so I am going to upgrade soon.

Thanks again,

Rob Anderson

From giorgiomantovani giorgiomantovani.com Thu Feb 27 15:53:20 2003
Date: Thu, 27 Feb 2003 19:46:30 +0100
From: giorgiomantovani at giorgiomantovani.com
To: feenberg
Subject: nber

    [ The following text is in the "iso-8859-1" character set. ]
    [ Your display is set for the "US-ASCII" character set.  ]
    [ Some characters may be displayed incorrectly. ]

please update your article inserting these lines 

http://www.nber.org/cdrecord.html 

if you have the grub bootloader:
kernel (hd0,1)/boot/vmlinuz-2.2.20 root=/dev/hda2 hdx=ide-scsi 

thanks... your article was really really helpful, great job 

giorgio 

Date: Thu, 12 May 2005 08:50:31 GMT
From: bmward is at inet.net.nz
To: feenberg@nber.org

Daniel

Thank you for your document on CD writing with IDE writers.  It certainly helped
me get it sorted quickly. Here are some additional comments you may wish to add.

It is possible to use an IDE CD writer for reading as well as for writing. 
These notes relate to Debian 3.0, kernel 2.4.27, ide-scsi as a module. I have no
idea how they relate to other environments!

1. Using kernel 2.4.x, it is not necessary to pass 'hdx=ide-scsi' to the kernel
at boot time. At least on a Debian 3.0 system,  it is possible to either load
the module in /etc/modules or use 'modprobe ide-scsi' and then 'cdrecord
-scanbus' shows the CD writer.

2. If  not passed to the (2.4.x) kernel at boot-time, it is possible to 'rmmod
ide-scsi', then 'cdrecord -scanbus' no longer identifies the drive and it can
then be used as a CD ROM drive. 

Get the best of both worlds; load ide-scsi only when wishing to write and unload
it to read CDs.

Bruce
Ward