On Sun, Feb 02, 2003 at 01:25:58PM -0800, Paul E Condon wrote:
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?
Nah, if they're both on the IDE bus, they're both ATAPI. ATAPI stands
for "AT Attachment Packet Interface". It basically involves using SCSI
protocol/commands over an IDE bus, "AT Attachment" being the posh name
for IDE, and was designed for talking to CD drives without a SCSI card
or one of those awkward proprietary buses some early CD-ROMs had.
Because of this, Linux uses "SCSI emulation" to talk to CD writers (as
does Windoze). The Linux driver for this is crap, according to Joerg
Schilling, author of cdrecord (see man cdrecord). ATAPI itself has a
degree of intrinsic crappitude as well, because it uses IDE hardware,
and IDE is crap.