I have a HP CD-writer Plus. Linux recognizes it as just a standard CD drive. How do I get Linux set up to recognize this device as a CD-burner?

I want your toy budget!

You just need some software to do the burning. xcdroast, kOnCD, many others. You'll need to set up some SCSI emulation stuff in the kernel and add a line like this to your lilo.confAdjust for your setup and season to your taste. Man pages for the burner software gives the gory details.

Have you tried cdrecord? You can do "cdrecord -scanbus" and get a list of the usable devices. I can do this with RedHat 7.1 and an IDE CD-RW.

Okay, let's start with xcdroast: The executable is on my HD, and ready to run. Is the manual there somewhere also?

Bad luck

# xcdroast

results in following message:

"Failed to scan the SCSI-bus. No permission to access the generic SCSI devices or no SCSI support enabled in the Kernel.
For ATAPI devices you have to install the SCSI-emulation first. Please see the CD writing HOWTO".

QUESTIONS:
1.) The system has put an entry into my lilo.conf: "hdd=ide-scsi". My CD's are attached to the IDE channel of my motherboard. How can I tell if this entry is correct?
2.) How do I tell if my kernel contains support for CDRW's?
3.) I assume my CDRW is not a SCSI device. However, somehow, I have to fool the system into thinking it is, according to stuff I have read. If this is true, do I have to recompile my kernel to get this support inclulded?
4.) I want to copy files to a CD-R from my HD. Can I just drag and drop, once the configuration is correct?
5.) Quite often, people refer to the HOWTO's. Are these found on the Linux documentation project or somewhere else?

note: I found the answer to question 1.): /var/log/dmesg identifies my CD-Writer as hdd.

On my Mandrake system I have to be root to successfully use the cd writing software. I am not sure of the technical reasoning.
I think the program is gcombust, but I am not !00% on that.

Here are the results of using the command "cdrecord -scanbus"

[root@localhost /root]# /usr/bin/cdrecord -scanbus
Cdrecord 1.9 (i686-pc-linux-gnu) Copyright (C) 1995-2000 Jörg Schilling
Linux sg driver version: 3.1.17
Using libscg version 'schily-0.1'
scsibus0:
/usr/bin/cdrecord: Warning: controller returns wrong size for CD capabilities page.
0,0,0 0) 'E-IDE ' 'CD-ROM 56X ' '13 ' Removable CD-ROM
0,1,0 1) 'IDE-CD ' 'R/RW 4x4x24 ' '1.04' Removable CD-ROM
0,2,0 2) *
0,3,0 3) *
0,4,0 4) *
0,5,0 5) *
0,6,0 6) *

Can anybody tell me what this means, or what to do next?

The Linux Documentation Project's Howto at http://wt.xpilot.org/linux/cdr/html/CDWriting-2.html, says in section 2.1 Quickstart, that "your version should be 2.0.X or 2.2.Y...". This appears to be the most authoritative on the subject, however, I suspect that like many documents written for linux, it is out of date. I suspect that there is an easier way as a result of Linux V7.1 and the kernel 2.4.2.

Is there?

Though I've not tried the cd-writer I've put in a new server yet or even thought of using it (I have 1 in a Windows pc ) I did come across the following info while configuring for recompiling of the kernel..
First you need SCSI emulation and for your writer to work with that you need Generic SCSI drivers. Both need to be compiled into the kernel.

So under SCSI configuration look for those 2 things.

Why all that trouble you might say.. and really I dunno..
Whatever happened to plug and play?

I have recompiled my kernel with SCSI emulation and Generic SCSI drivers as modules.

Now, here are all the things I have tried:
Even though I think I have compiled these modules into my kernel, I
have no idea if they are up and running. They don't seem to be. The
documentation says that modules are loaded automatically, but are they
today.
Where do I go from here?

See http://peachy.com/howto/cdr.html

The Link above is invalid.

Do as root "lsmod" and make sure the scsi modules are loaded before you do "cdrecord -scanbus".

Whenever stuff like this happens, and pages disappear, google often still has a cache of the page. In this case, doing a search for peachy howto cdr returns a suitable link. Select the "cached" link and you can see the original howto document.

http://216.239.37.100/search?q=cache...&hl=en&ie=UTF8

Slackware 8.0
TEAC CDRW on IDE2, primary - /dev/hdc

This is just what I did to get scsi emulation working. I haven't burned anything yet.

If any of this is too elementary to you, skip it, but it sounds like you either didn't compile something in, or a module is not loaded.

In X, go to /usr/src/linux (or whatever dir holds the sources for your current kernel), and do:
make xconfig

Hit the 'Load Configruation from File' button and put in '.config' and hit OK

Check for the following:

ATA/IDE/MFM/RLL suport:
IDE ATA & ATAPI Block Devices:
IDE/ATAPI CDROM support (kernel for me, module name ide-cd)
SCSI Emulation Support (module named ide-scsi.o)

SCSI Support:
SCSI Support (module named scsi_mod.o)
SCSI Disk Support (module named sd_mod.o)
SCSI CD-ROM Support (module named sr_mod.o)
SCSI Generic Support (module named sg.o)

I guess you can build whichever ones of those you want into kernel, instead of using modules. Whatever doesn't get built into the kernel, modprobe in. For me, this meant doing:

modprobe scsi_mod
modprobe sg
modprobe sd_mod
modprobe sr_mod
modprobe ide-scsi

Modprobe in whatever isn't directly compiled into kernel then do lsmod as root to check what's running. I get this:

Module Size Used by
tulip 38320 1
hid 12960 0 (unused)
mousedev 3968 1
input 3328 0 [hid mousedev]
usb-uhci 22336 0 (unused)
usbcore 50624 0 [hid usb-uhci]
ide-scsi 7712 1
sd_mod 10704 0 (unused)
sr_mod 12208 2
sg 29520 0
scsi_mod 89664 4 [ide-scsi sd_mod sr_mod sg]
emu10k1 54816 0
ac97_codec 9632 0 [emu10k1]
sound 55296 0 (unused)
soundcore 3600 6 [emu10k1 sound]
NVdriver 946176 10

Obviously, you won't see things here that you have chosen to compile directly into the kernel. But you should make sure the the things in the above list are either in the kernel, or insterted as modules. (Not sure if they're all really needed--that's why I went with modules, so I can remove the unnecessary ones after testing)

Once I was sure it worked I added
/sbin/modprobe <module>
for each of the modules i needed into my /etc/rc.d/rc.modules script.

Here's my /etc/fstab showing the line added for my scsi-emulated burner:

/dev/hda1 /mnt/mdk ext2 defaults 1 1
/dev/hdg2 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/hdg1 / reiserfs defaults 1 1
/dev/hdg3 /usr reiserfs defaults 1 1
/dev/hdg4 /home reiserfs defaults 1 1
/dev/hdb /mnt/cdrom iso9660 user,iocharset=iso8859-1,umask=0,exec,codepage=850,ro,noauto 0 0
/dev/scd0 /mnt/burner iso9660 user,iocharset=iso8859-1,umask=0,exec,codepage=850,ro,noauto 0 0
none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto user,iocharset=8859-1,umask=0,sync,exec,codepage=850,noauto 0 0

Then in my lilo.conf, under the kernel I was enabling scsi emulation in, I added:
append=" hdc=ide-scsi"

Substitute your own hdx, of course.

I did cdrecord -scanbus, and there was my burner! I can also mount /dev/scd0 /mnt/burner. I read that you also need the loop module (or kernel support) for certain uses, but I forget what it was. Let us know how it goes.