Help with CD-burner and 2.6 kernel

pickarooney

So my burner has decided all of a sudden not to give any information about itself...
What I mean is, from one minute to the next, when trying to burn a CD with k3b, I can no longer test the possible write speeds of my burner, and it defaults to 48x, which makes unreadable CDs. It's impossible to manually alter the burn speed.

The whole notion of IDE burners, SCSI emulation and the 5 or so different names by which a device is referred to confuses me greatly.
Reboots, reinstallations have been tried, with no luck.

Short of reinstalling the OS, or compiling a kernel (I'm just not up to doing it, it's way over my head), I can't think of a way to resolve this, and cannot understand how it can just suddenly happen that the burner is no longer useable.
Has anyone any ideas? The kernel version is 2.6.3-13mdk - default kernel from Mdk 10 and my fstab looks like this:

/dev/hdb1 / ext3 defaults 1 1
none /dev/pts devpts mode=0620 0 0
/dev/hdb6 /home ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom auto umask=0,user,iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850,noauto,ro,exec 0 0
none /mnt/floppy supermount dev=/dev/fd0,fs=ext2:vfat,--,umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-15,sync,codepage=850 0 0
/dev/sda4 /mnt/usb vfat defaults 0 0
/dev/hda1 /mnt/windows vfat umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hdb5 swap swap defaults 0 0

nadir

you dont need scsi-emulation with cdrecord anymore, even though i think that way may be slightly faster.
I use xcdroast, pleanty fast too.
install it with whatever deps it requires.

pickarooney

Yeah, s'pose, the interface of xcdroast blows though, and I couldn't get to work last time for some reason I've since forgotten.

deimos

I could be wrong but I beleive that the write speed of your burner is determined by using SMART, and I think it has to be enabled in the bios



try doing a
smartctl /dev/hdc -a | more
and see what your get......

pickarooney

deimos wrote:

I could be wrong but I beleive that the write speed of your burner is determined by using SMART, and I think it has to be enabled in the bios



try doing a
smartctl /dev/hdc -a | more
and see what your get......

Command not found (as root).
I installed xcdroast and it found two burners, the same one twice as ATA and ATAPI. Which is nice, I suppose. but which is the real one?

nadir

I guessing the ATAPI one is the real one.

you need to install smartmontools to get smartctl, but to be honest I dont think it will help, neither of my maxtor ide or scsi disks support it or the plextor and LG burners. I could be wrong of course, give it a shot if your stuck i guess.

You need to make an image first with xcdroast, but its fairly simple, should work ok.

pickarooney

Cheers, it burned, at at 22x (I realised too late that I forgot to lower the speed) and surprisingly the burned CD is fully readable. Thumbs up to that then, it may be ugly, but it does a good job

nadir

pickarooney wrote:

it may be ugly, but it does a good job

exactly

pickarooney

Spoke too soon. I managed to burn two CDs with xcdroast and now it tells me there's no CD in the drive any time I try to burn (actually it gives some sarky message about things maybe working faster with a medium in the drive). Balls to it

nadir

run it as root.
all the cool people run their apps as root

pickarooney

I've reached a kind of compromise with my burner. As long as I don't do anything else than burning during a session, it lets me make as many CDs as I want (well, I've only wanted to burn 4 so far ) but if I go messign around with other CDs and things, well then I can just whistle for my disks.

nadir

how do you go about writing cds with it?
i do it like this

Master Tracks -> (add all the files/folders i want) Create Session/Image -> Master to Image File
Write Tracks , (add the image) Write mode TAO (although i think DAO works better on my other machine)
and then just write tracks, I never got the problem you are having. wonder what could be causing it. maybe you could make images with mkisofs, or use cdrecord on the command line.

pickarooney

Cheers nadir, it's pretty much the same way I make them, though I often skip the iso creation stage.

But, xcdroast is now doing exactly the same as K3b, that is burning once and then not recognising the drive until reboot. I need help with the following:

1) finding out what changes when I reboot to bring the drive back online, so that I can do it without rebooting - what log files would help with this?

2) updating the firmware for a SAMSUNG SM-352B firmware T809. Are there any special things to be taken into consideration, such as kernel version or can I just lash it into google and take what comes up?

I could try and use cdrecord from the command line, but I reckon it'll be the same thing.
I could also make a bunch of ISOs at once and burn them from the command line I suppose.

Feel like a loser rebooting linux all the time, tee bee haitch.

nadir

I had a similar problem with my dvd drive a while back actually, I think i had the jumper set to cable select. Try maybe setting it to primary, or switching it to slave even to see if it solves the proble.

pickarooney

Can it be slave when it's on its own on the IDE cable?

nadir

don't know, but ive had trouble like that before with drives. Id make it master if it has its own ide cable just to be sure.