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

From: Sridhar the POWERful <vance_at_ikickass.org>
Date: Tue Apr 9 19:41:38 2002

On Tue, 9 Apr 2002, Doc 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.

I don't need to boot off it, but I would like to use my Yamaha CRW2200S
16-10-40X CD-R/W in my RS/6000 397, but I can't get the SCSI to recognize
the drive. I have no idea why. The drive is at ID5. The main CD-ROM in
the machine is at ID6 and is a 20X Wide Plextor, which works just fine. I
have termination disabled on all devices, and I have a wide terminator on
the end of the cable.

Peace... Sridhar
Received on Tue Apr 09 2002 - 19:41:38 BST