Linux optical drive control
 

I am working on a personal project of mine and i have come across a situation :

i need some kind of library (C preferably) that would give me low level control of the optical drive.
for eg : let me burn 1 sector on a given side, layer and track

i googled this and seems like no such library exits ... so the next option would be write my own ... in that case any pointers to where to start ... ? again google did not turn up much.

thanks for the help!
ankit

Do you have some reason to believe that optical disks and drives can be accessed at that kind of level?

why cant they be ... all the utilities like k3b etc in the end tell the drive to write / read a sector/cluster at a particular offset on the disk.

I am not sure how that all works, but I THINK that k3b generates the .ISO then sends that to the drive. I also think they use tracks instead of sectors and clusters.

One possible source of information might be DVD+RW/+R. Either looking at the source code to see how it works or looking at the Devs web site.

i was under the impression that if you went down enough in the level hierarchy you would get this kind of control of the drive

I'm not an expert by any means, but there are some real differences between how data is stored on a hd and on a cd. On a hd, the tracks, sectors, cylinders, etc are in a fixed position on the disk and can be accessed by a predefined geometry. On a cd, that geometry (as far as my understanding goes) is not so fixed, it is laid out to some extent when the cd is burned, and the information describing it is stored on the cd. Another big difference is that data on a cd is stored on one long spiral unlike the concentric tracks on a hard disk (though maybe there are other ways write a cd, I don't know) I don't consider wikipedia articles as authoritative, but their description of the iso filesystem will give some idea of what you are up against. Also, good though somewhat dated info is at http://www.cdrfaq.org/