[LUNI] Update: IDE CD burner frustrations -- Black Screen of Death

[scott thomason]

On Monday 18 November 2002 05:04 pm, Jirsa, Jeff wrote:
> When cdrecord has problems with ATAPI drives on Linux this usually
> is a Linux
> kernel problem. The Linux kernel maintainers unfortunately refuse
> to correct their current IDE driver system setup which does not
> support ATAPI by default.
> ATAPI _is_ SCSI over IDE transport. It is hard to understand why
> Linux still uses a standard driver setup that is designed for IDE
> CD-ROM drives made before 1994 (using a IDE compat mode that only
> allows to use the drive read-only) and does not handle to send SCSI
> commands to ATAPI drives by default. This makes it hard for people
> who just started with Linux to do CD-writing on Linux if they own
> an ATAPI drive.

Believe it or not, there is some discussion on doing away with this 
madness in 2.5. But it may not make the cut.

> By a show of hands/e-mails, if you use an IDE burner, 1) what Linux
> distro do you use; 2) is it stock or did you compile the kernel 3)
> and/or cdrecord?

I've had good luck with RH80 and my new ATAPI Plexwriter using 
Redhat's standard kernel. When I replaced that kernel with 
2.4.19+preempt, I found I could no longer burn at 48x (the max 
capacity of the drive); I had to back down to 24x. I assume one of 
those 200 patches Redhat applies deals with this...