Help for a newbie

[Matt Graham]

After a long battle with technology, JD Austin wrote:
> Cary Mabe wrote:
>> I've been having no luck at all burning an audio cd  (any kind of CD, 
>> really)  with the linux system.  I don't think that it is any problem with
>> any of the cd writing tools I'm using (I've tried several)  I think the
>> problem lies with the fact that my drives  cd, hd, etc. are all showing up
>> as scsi drives when they are all on ide.  I'm new but I don't think that's
>> normal!

If your distro is using the relatively recent and still sort of beta 
libata-pata modules for IDE chipset support, then yes, all IDE devices will 
show up as SCSI devices.  This can confuse people.  (And if you have more 
than 15 partitions on an IDE disk, it can PWN people.)

> Way back when the original cdrecord program was written for scsi only
> drives.  People with IDE drives wanted to be able to use it so they
> found a way to get it to work.

Despite Joerg's protests, "cdrecord dev=/dev/hdc ..." works really well on the 
Linux 2.6 kernel.  Before, you had to use ide-scsi emulation, which was 
somewhat confusing.  BTDT.  If you know what your devices are called, a safe 
way to see what's up is to "cdrecord dev=/dev/foo -prcap" , which will merely 
query the /dev/foo device and PRint its CAPabilities wrt CD/DVD-recording.  
If you get something like "Device seems to be: Generic mmc2 
DVD-R/DVD-RW/DVD-RAM" out of that, that's a good sign that you have the 
device name right and can use that device name in future cdrecord or 
growisofs commands.  Note that if you have 2 or more CD/DVD+-RWs, you can 
tell which one is which by "cdrecord -eject dev=/dev/foo" and noting which 
one ejects.  HTH,

-- 
   I have had to deal with kangaroos, donkeys, cows, wild pigs
   and some press leaks by former Vice President Cheney.
   --MegaHAL, trained on ASR
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see