Western digital drives and Linux?

[Jeffrey Pyne]

On Friday, December 29, 2000, John W wrote:

> Hello all I haven't posted in some time mainly a nebie/lurker.
> I have been running Mandrake 7.2 and recently installed a CD-RW drive. I
have 
> not been able to gain access to the drive to say the least. I have tried 
> everything I can find to include adding my user account to the cdrom and 
> cdwriter group. I have recompiled the kernel to diable ide/atapi support
and 
> added scsi emulation.

Have you checked out the very helpful CD-Writing HOWTO on LinuxDoc.org?
It's at http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/CD-Writing-HOWTO.html.  When I got my
IDE Iomega CD-RW, I just read through that and got the drive working just
beautifully.  

> I also have a standard cdrom perhaps this is causing issues I don't know.

I also have a regular IDE CD-ROM drive that works the way it did before I
added the CD-RW.  Remember that the regular CD-ROM is treated as an IDE
device (e.g. /dev/hdc) and the CD-RW is treated like a SCSI device (e.g.
/dev/scd0).  

> I have seen some comments regarding western digital HD's not working in 
> harmony with Linux?? I have never had problems regarding the HD that I am 
> aware of.

I'm pretty sure one of the hard drives in my Linux box is a Western Digital.
It has not caused any problems with my CD-RW (that I am aware of).

> This si the output from cdrecord -scanbus;
> Cdrecord 1.9 (i586-mandrake-linux-gnu) Copyright (C) 1995-2000 Jörg
Schilling
> Linux sg driver version: 2.1.39
> Using libscg version 'schily-0.1'
> scsibus0:
>         0,0,0     0) 'SONY    ' 'CD-RW  CRX140E  ' '1.0n' Removable CD-ROM
>         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) *

Judging from this output, it looks like you are real close to getting this
working.  Exactly what problem are you having?  Do you get an error when you
try to burn a CD?  Are you not able to mount CD's?  Does smoke pour out of
your machine when you try to play a music CD?  

> I have followed the tutorial available at the Mandrake website and nothing

> seems to work. I know a lot of you use Debian would perhaps a switch help
in 
> any way or perhaps an older or newer kernel. I just want this to work!

Given your distribution, your kernel should work just fine (assuming you've
compiled in all the required options and modules).  I have had my CD-RW
working on a 2.0.xx kernel, a few 2.2.xx kernels and currently with a
2.4.0-test12 kernel.

HTH,
~Jeff