“I feel quite old now. When I started using recordable CD-ROM
drives, they were large external SCSI devices. I remember the pain
of wasting ten bucks on CD-R media when the disc failed to write
properly.”
“Now IDE recordable CD-ROM drives are under $200, with the media
costing pennies a piece instead of dollars. Low cost write-once
(CD-R) and re-writable (CD-RW) CD-ROM make a great backup media.
They’re also handy for downloading ISO files of the latest Linux
distributions.”
“But IDE CD-RW installation under Linux has one pitfall … the
kernel. Since Linux utilities treat all CD-RW drives as SCSI
devices, some kernel modification is required to properly utilize
IDE CD-RW drives.”