Half on, half off -- New CD-R drive and 512-byte blocks

From: Richard Erlacher <edick_at_idcomm.com>
Date: Tue Apr 9 15:37:49 2002

It's likely that if your CD-RW drive is a SCSI type, you'll be able to do what
you want. If it's an IDE type, you'll probably best forget it.

I've got no experience with CD-RW's, but LOTS of it with CD-R's, and I've
followed the development of CR-RW and DVD-R drives with considerable interest.
However, I'm not a CD-RW fan because of the media cost.

If the drive manufacturer can profide the command set and you can figure out
how to create a driver for it for the target environment, you can do what you
want. However, there's lots of learning curve. We struggled for three years
just getting a standard adopted for bootable CD's. I suspect this may get to
be even more tangled.

Dick

----- Original Message -----
From: "Christopher Smith" <csmith_at_amdocs.com>
To: "Classiccmp (E-mail)" <classiccmp_at_classiccmp.org>
Sent: Tuesday, April 09, 2002 2:17 PM
Subject: Half on, half off -- New CD-R drive and 512-byte blocks


> Hi everybody. This isn't strictly on topic, but I think the intent
> of the question makes it close enough.
>
> I just bought a new CD-RW drive -- a Sony CRX145s -- and am curious
> about whether it may read the 512-byte blocks necessary for using it
> as a backup boot device on my VAXen, Sparc, SGI, etc.
>
> Does anyone know whether this, or just for information, some other
> CD-RW unit, will do such a thing?
>
> Note that I do know that discs are written in 2048 byte blocks, and
> the answer won't affect its performance in writing disks on these
> systems. I am also aware that doing this for the long term may
> needlessly shorten the life of the drive. As I said above, it is
> more for curiosity, and eventually I would like to know that in case
> my RRD42 dies, I have a backup. :)
>
> Chris
>
> Christopher Smith, Perl Developer
> Amdocs - Champaign, IL
>
> /usr/bin/perl -e '
> print((~"\x95\xc4\xe3"^"Just Another Perl Hacker.")."\x08!\n");
> '
>
>
>
Received on Tue Apr 09 2002 - 15:37:49 BST