:Linux Gazette: Easy Addition of an IDE CD-Writer to a Linux/Redhat PC
Linux Gazette: Easy Addition of an IDE CD-Writer to a Linux/Redhat PC Sep 23, 2000, 18 :14 UTC (4 Talkback[s]) (4649 reads) (Other stories by Daniel Feenberg)
"The CD-Writing HOWTO at http://www.guug.de/~winni/linux/and the official cdrecord site at www.fokus.gmd.de/research/cc/glone/employees/joerg.schilling/private/cdrecord.html offer a great deal of information about installing and using CD-ROM writers. Certainly much more than you need to know for an ordinary Linux installation. If you don't want to support an obsolete drive, or an older kernel, or VAX VMS, then you probably don't need to recompile the kernel or make any devices. This short document should be sufficient to get you started burning disks. Once you are started, the official documents will guide you to such esoterica as audio, bootable, multisession and hybrid disks. After determining that RedHat 6.1 was so easy, I tried setting up several other distributions, including RedHat 6.0, SUSE 6.1, Debian 2.1, and Storm 2000. All of those were slightly harder because they didn't include a recent version of cdrecord but none required a kernel rebuild, I have noted the differences along the way."
"I believe any drives you bought in a store recently will qualify. The cdrecord docs say that all 1999 or later ATAPI drives support MMC, which is sufficient. Many earlier drives are suppoted also. A look on the shelves at the local computer superstore did not turn up any that mentioned MMC or Linux on the box. My first installation used an older Richoh MP6200A cd recorder. I did more installations with the MagicWriter 4X4X24. This is a very cheap drive, but the manual had a 1999 copyright date and it did work as I expected."
"Perform the physical installation of the new drive just as you would any ide drive. It can replace your original read-only drive or be added on. Make sure the drive jumper is set for master or slave as required, the power cable is connected and the data cable has the correct orientation. You shouldn't have to do any CMOS setup. I am told that keeping the cd-writer on a different cable from the hard drive speeds data transfers, but this is probably not significant with Pentium class machines."
