Re: cdrecord: What does "BURN-Free is OFF" mean?
On Mon, Feb 03, 2003 at 08:23:15PM +1100, Russell wrote:
> Pigeon wrote:
> >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.
>
> Is this scsi over ide atapi thing just as valid for read-only CD drives?
All except the really old ones. Some of the first CD-ROMs had
proprietary interfaces; sometimes old ISA sound cards are to be found
with headers labelled "Sony CD-ROM", "Panasonic CD-ROM" etc., usually
less than 40 pins. I think there were also one or two early CD-ROMs
that had IDE but non-ATAPI interfaces. The Linux kernel seems to still
support these, but your chances of coming across one - especially in
working order - are close to zero, and in any case it'd be so slow
that you'd only use it out of desperation.
It should therefore be possible to talk to the CD reader as well as
the CD writer using the ide-scsi driver, and this is what most people
do. However, there exist CD readers, like mine, which despite being
ATAPI do not work properly with ide-scsi (cdda2wav throws up screen
after screen of SCSI errors). I therefore run my writer with ide-scsi
and the reader with ide-cd.
Pigeon
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