Phillip Pearson - web + electronics notes

tech notes and web hackery from a new zealander who was vaguely useful on the web back in 2002 (see: python community server, the blogging ecosystem, the new zealand coffee review, the internet topic exchange).

2003-3-15

Getting my CD writer working

The aforementioned nForce2 box has a CD writer. Finally got around to getting it going today. It turns out that to get it going under Linux, you have to fool the kernel into thinking it's actually a SCSI drive

If you have to do this, the following script will make life easier for you. Save it as /usr/bin/cdburn, and from now on use cdburn instead of cdrecord.

BTW try cdburn -scanbus first to make sure that it works. If you get an error about not finding /dev/pg* or you needing to be root, try rebooting or removing all the modules and running it again. It didn't work for me until I tried running cdrecord in the experimental ATAPI mode, which locked the system up, forcing me to reboot.

#!/bin/bash

# http://www.unc.edu/~aperrin/tips/src/debian-cdrw.html

rmmod ide-cd
rmmod cdrom
modprobe scsi_mod
modprobe sg
modprobe ide-scsi
modprobe cdrom
modprobe sr_mod

cdrecord $*

rmmod sr_mod
rmmod cdrom
rmmod ide-scsi
rmmod sg
rmmod scsi_mod
modprobe cdrom
modprobe ide-cd