Help File Library: Adding an IDE CD-Writer to Linux
The CD-Writing HOWTO at
http://www.guug.de/~winni/linux/
and the official cdrecord site over
here
offer a great deal of 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. 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 bootable, multisession and hybrid disks.
After determining that RedHat 6.1 was so easy, 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 cdrecord RPM file but none required a kernel rebuild, I have noted
the differences along the way. 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 1.8.1 or better (included with RedHat).
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 new drives at the store 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 a
MagicWriter 4X4X24. This is a very cheap drive, but the manual had a 1999
copyright date and it did work.
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 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/messages file should have a
line about the new "ATAPI" drive.
SCSI Emulation Setup
Find out the name of 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).
- Become root.
- Add the following line to the end of your /etc/rc.local:
insmod ide-scsi
RedHat seemed to be the only distribution with an rc.local file. For the
others, you have to find some other mechanism for running this command
before attempting to record.
- Add the following line to the end of your /etc/lilo.conf file:
append="hdc=ide-scsi"
Where "hdc" might be "hdb" or "hdd" depending on where your drive is
installed. This instructs the kernel to access the cd-writer via the scsi
emulation driver.
-
Reconfigure LILO by running the following command at the Unix shell
prompt:
lilo
-
You need to ``install'' cdrecord and mkisofs. Version 1.8.1 of cdrecord
is on the RedHat disk in an rpm file. Here are the commands for the
software installation with RedHat.
cd /CD-ROM/RedHat/RPMS
rpm --install cdrecord*
rpm --install mkisofs*
The other distributions either included an older version of cdrecord (1.6)
which did not support my drives, or did not include cdrecord at all. If
don't have RedHat and need to compile these yourself, the most recent
version of cdrecord can easily be found at www.freshmeat.net. I noted
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:
tar -xvf cdrecord*tar
cd cdrecord...
make
make install
The cdrecord tarball includes mkisofs. Both packages get installed to
/opt/shilly/bin so you will need to make links from a directory in the
root path, such as /usr/bin.
-
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, and in any case reading is
beyond the scope of this document.
/dev/scd0 /cdrom auto defaults,ro,noauto,user,exec 0 0
-
Reboot the machine. 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 if the installation was successfull:
cdrecord -scanbus
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:
0,0,0 0) 'Richoh' 'MP602A' '2.03' Removeable CD-ROM Drive
Only the digit triple at the start is significant. The only error message
I saw in my experiments combined the cases of (1) scsi emulation not
correctly installed and (2) drive not supported. At that point you might
try getting reading to work as an IDE drive, then with SCSI emulation,
before concluding that the drive was not supported.
Writing Disks
-
Writing disks is a two step process. First the ISO filesystem is created
on your hard disk:
mkisofs -v -o file.iso file...
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 "-r" option (for Rock Ridge) will allow
longer names, but if you actaully 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.
On my 1997 vintage 233mHz AMD with a 5400 rpm hard disk, and a double
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.
Any corrections or suggestions should be sent to me. I am particularly
interested in hearing which distributions will work with these minimal
instructions.This page is kept at http://www.nber.org/cdrecord.html
feenberg@nber.org
