Hi folks,

After the glow of the Installfest today, I took home some new
information. Previously I was unable to get my CD/RW drive working,
with the "cdrecord" program. I have a RedHat 7.0 system.

The advice I was given was to recompile the kernel _without_
IDE-CD-ROM support, but with SCSI emulation, and then I should be able
to use the "cdrecord" program, as Bob T. was using at the Installfest
today.

I recompiled my kernel without IDE CDROM support and with SCSI emulation
support. Since nothing was mentioned about whether to leave _in_
"regular" SCSI CDROM support, I left that part as a module.

The bottom line is, I was able to use the cdrecord program (although I
still find it somewhat cryptic), but was unable to mount my CDROM drives
as usual.

I tried both the standard "mount" command which relies on /etc/fstab
(e.q. "mount /dev/cdrom", and also  explicitly doing a mount command,
e.g. "mount -t iso9660  -o ro /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom". Each time, I got
the same message back, to the effect that I had either a "bad
superblock" on the device (I  tried several CD's, that wasn't it....) or
too many mounted drives (...that definetly wasn't it either, only two
partitions and "/proc" were mounted).

I tried inserting, by turns, the ide and scsi cdrom modules, with
modprobe,  to see if I could mount either my "normal" CD-ROM (DVD)
drive, or my CD/RW drive. Those modules are, specifically "ide-cd.o" and
"sr_mod.o", which both seem to  rely on the "cdrom.o" module.

In all cases, I got the same result, even after several kernel compile
re-tries. "cdrecord" now recognizes the CD/RW and the DVD drive; they
are noticed in the boot-time message sequence (dmesg),  and I can use
the program. But I can not mount the CD-ROM drives at all!

The situation I am in now is, I have to load my "new" kernel in order to
record a disk, and my old kernel; in order to mount a disk.

What am I doing wrong? Does anyone have a suggestion?

This is the first time I have posted to this discussion group. I am not
new to Linux, but I am  unacquainted with the ins and outs of "cdrecord"
and CD/RW drives in general. Especially the quasi-SCSI interface
cdrecord demands.

My system is a Compaq Presario with lots of RAM running the new kernel
2.4.2 (from ftp.kernel.org) and an Athlon chip with a high processor
speed...about 1.1GHz, in theory. I am running RedHat 7.0.

Any answers would be appreciated.

I also wonder what the standard procedure is for using "cdrecord" Is it
necessary to create a CD-ROM disk image first using "mkisofs" program,
or am I missing something?

Thanks for your help...and for your patience in reading through  this.

Sincerely,

Bryan Zimmer
baz at baz-tech.com