Getting my CD burner working

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Aug 28, 2006 at 04:28:37PM -0400, Tom Watts wrote:
> I have a CD burner that has worked under Linux before, from Red Hat 9 up 
> to Fedora Core 2, but has been unable to write to CDs since then. 
> Reading is no problem and I can write CDs under Windows, although it 
> almost always messes up writing iso images (I know this because of 
> Fedora's media check).  I'm not really sure where to start, but here is 
> the output of su -c 'cdrecord -scanbus':

If windows creates bad CDs according to the media check, then most
likely you are using bad media (or media your drive doesn't like) or the
burner is failing.

> Cdrecord-Clone 2.01.01a03-dvd (i686-pc-linux-gnu) Copyright (C) 
> 1995-2005 J?rg Schilling
> [...]
> Using libscg version 'schily-0.8'.
> scsibus1:
> 	1,0,0	100) 'CyberDrv' 'CW088D CD-R/RW  ' '15HF' Removable CD-ROM
> 	1,1,0	101) 'DVD ROM ' 'CI-BDV316E      ' '0052' Removable CD-ROM
> 	1,2,0	102) *
> [...]
> 
> Using cdrecord, even as root, always fails.  I've recently been thinking 
> about upgrading to a DVD burner in hoping that it'll solve the problem 
> in the process, but want to see if this one is broken or just improperly 
> configured before going down the upgrade path.  If more info is needed, 
> please let me know.  TIA for any help.

On a modern system (using a 2.6 kernel and no ide-scsi emulation garbage
loaded), you should have to do something like:

cdrecord -scanbus -dev ATAPI:

To use a drive you should do:
cdrecord -dev ATAPI:/dev/hdc ...

Works for me.  Now hopefully sometime soon libata for pata will get
merged into the 2.6 kernel, after which all devices should show up as
scsi, and cdrecord should be happy again without stupid ATAPI options.

For writing DVDs, you would do:
growisofs -Z /dev/hdc=file.iso
or
growisofs -Z /dev/hdc -J -R -othermkisofsoptions /path/to/files/to/burn
or replace -Z with -M to append to a disc made with the above line.

Personally I am very happy with my plextor drives, since at least for
DVD drives being able to update the firmware to support new brands of
disc properly is quite handy, and plextor is the only make I know of
that has a linux tool for updating firmware.

--
Len Sorensen
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