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

From: Doc <doc_at_mdrconsult.com>
Date: Tue Apr 9 17:07:52 2002

On Tue, 9 Apr 2002, Christopher Smith wrote:

> 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?

  Haven't tried my CD-RW on a non-Intel box as boot device, but I know
that the 512-byte boot block is not the only issue. For instance, I
have a Sony 8x reader with an IBM "microcode upgrade" that will boot my
SparcStation, every RS6k I own, and my Alphas, ***unless*** it's a
VMS/OpenVMS CD. The BabyVAXen also won't boot off it. The Indy won't.
  OTOH, My Plextor 32x, May It Rest In Peace (I dropped it!), would boot
all the above except VMS CDs.
  I know that early RS/6000s did some sense checking that narrowed the
field considerably. I _guess_ that VMS does the same. About the rest,
I'm clueless.

  Back to reading 512-byte blocks, both my old TEAC 55R and my new
Yamaha SCSI CDRW have a jumper to allow 512-byte reads, as do most of
the better SCSI readers.

        Doc
Received on Tue Apr 09 2002 - 17:07:52 BST