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

From: Christopher Smith <csmith_at_amdocs.com>
Date: Tue Apr 9 16:06:16 2002

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Richard Erlacher [mailto:edick_at_idcomm.com]

> 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 should have mentioned that -- it's SCSI, of course.

> However, I'm not a CD-RW fan because of the media cost.

BEGIN off-topic-moment

The only reason I'm particularly interested in the RW capability of
this drive is for some experimentation with Linux on a Sega Dreamcast.

I have it booting from CD-R, but if the Dreamcast will use an RW disc,
it may save me money and coasters in the long-run.

END off-topic-moment

Perhaps it may also be useful for transferring data between two systems
with these drives (...or mine is an external, so the drive could be
carried), in the absence of a better removable media solution.

I must admit that last time I saw them, they were megabyte-per-megabyte
cheaper than any other common re-useable removable storage.

> 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.

I think that I should have been clearer here too -- what I'm
wondering is not whether it will work with the environment, since
I'm sure that cdrecord will compile and drive it in nearly any
environment I'm likely to need. The question is -- in the case
of my other drives going out, would it be possible to use this
drive as the primary boot device for one of these systems.

That, of course, requires the slightly odd (for a CD) block-size.

It's likely that I'll just plug it into the VAX and try booting
VMS from it -- that would answer the question pretty quickly. :)
I was just hoping that somebody knew right off...

Thanks,

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 - 16:06:16 BST