DvB wrote:
There is something different about the two CD writers, but I don't know what. All my guesses so far have not panned out. Both drives are on the same machine. The newer is hdc; the older is hdd. Both have scsi emulation installed via lilo as in:Paul E Condon <pecondon@quiknet.com> writes:What else might be wrong? Googling reveals that my newer writer might be "ATAPI". Is this important in this context? I found a few rants about ATAPI. I couldn't make out whether the author(s) thought it was good, but poorly supported by Linux, or bad in itself. How should the setups for these two drives differ (if at all) if one is "ATAPI" and the other is not?You pretty much have to use scsi emulation for atapi drives under Linux. However, I think cdrecord requires this, so if cdrecord's telling you that burnfree is off, you've probably got scsi emulation working. I think if cdrecord --scanbus finds your drive (as root), it's emulating.
append="hdc=ide-scsi\ hdd=ide-scsi"I can make an iso image using mkisofs and burn it on each drive using cdrecord with all parameters the same, except the drive selection. Both new CDs are readable on the computer on which they were made (and in both drives interchangeably)
BUT,the CD that was burnt in the newer drive is unreadable on any OTHER computer on which I have tried. Unreadable on another Debian i386 machine which has true SCSI hardware, and on a Mac 8500 and on an iMac, on an old Windoze laptop, and on a fairly modern Windoze PC. The CD that was burnt in the older drive works fine everywhere.
Why the difference? I really at a loss to understand. I've given some information about what I've found out that I don't understand because I think in might jog someone's memory and they might clue me in on what I am missing here.
The newer, non-writing drive is in the bus master position. The older drive, which writes nicely, is in the slave position on the cable. Can this make a difference?
I got the newer drive when a older CD read-only drive died, and I bought a replacement. It was the day after Thanksgiving and there was a sale at Staples that made the CD writer cheaper than a read-only drive. Now I worry that my old writer may fail, and I will be unable to burn useable CDs because something about newer hardware is incompatible with something else in my 3yr old system.
Please. Even foolish suggestions might be helpful here.Maybe, just this one time, when we find out what the problem is, it will be a problem that we can be proud of finding rather than just egg-on-my-face.
Paul