CD-RW/DVD-ROM Combo

[Rich Edelman]

On Tuesday 23 December 2003 08:36 am, Duane Attaway wrote:
> On Tue, 23 Dec 2003, Gene Dascher wrote:
> > Does anyone here have any experience using a CD-RW/DVD-ROM Combo Drive
> > with Linux?  I just got one and would like to know if there are any
> > pitfalls that I need to avoid.
>
<snip>
> If your system has enough memory for all your running applications, you
> can do heavy multi tasking and not worry about botching the recording
> session.  The buffer underrun problems start happening when things start a
> waiting line with the swap.
>
> Use the ide-scsi boot parameter for the kernel, so your cd burner of
> choice can use the scsi emulation.  I use cdrecord amd mkisofs, because I

Couple of things I want to mention here. If you happen to run 2.6, ide-scsi is 
deprecated and warns you as being so. cdrecord has been patched to accept 
dev=/dev/hdc or whatever your device may be, although the cdrecord author 
doesn't like that way, and he lets you know that. Not entirely sure what the 
earliest version of cdrecord that has that patch is, though. I'm running 
2.0a18, and I know 2.0a20 is the latest out there. It'll be in Gentoo's 
portage tree, or if you happen to run SuSE I can point you to updated RPMs 
that support it (as well as kernel 2.6.0 RPMs).

Also, be sure DMA is turned on for your cdrw drive! Otherwise you won't be 
able to burn above 8x without your system getting incredibly choppy, and you 
absolutely cannot burn above 16x without DMA. DMA will also help when you're 
watching DVDs with that drive.

Rich