I've run out of IDE ports & I need to add a CD-RW drive. I used an IDE expansion adapter (SIIG) & got an IDE CD-RW drive (Sony) & I can see the CD-RW drive, i.e., read CD's & eject, but I can't burn CD's. I use cdrtoaster & it asks for a driver - the default is /dev/sg0, but that doesn't work. I suspect that /dev/cdrom1 is wrong. I'm running Mandrake 8.1.

Questions:

Is there a separate driver for writing CD's.

Is /dev/sg0 the proper driver?

Is the IDE adapter really a scsi in disguise?

I have a SCSI card installed, so should I look for a SCSI CD-RW drive?

-- Vaughn

In order to use a CDRW to record CD's you need to load SCSI emulation for it. In Linux this is done with the ide-scsi kernel module (unless built into the kernel). You actually use SCSI emulation in Windows too - ever had ASPI problems? It's basically the same thing as ide-scsi in Linux.

Anyhow, in order to load SCSI emulation you will probably have to add a little something to the boot command in your bootloader for Linux. If you use Lilo you should edit /etc/fstab and add a line like this (hdc being your CDRW device - check what it's called - it should be easy to figure out if you read the dmesg output):
If you use Grub I'll happily let someone else tell you what line you should add to grub.conf cuz I don't have a clue.

You may also have to add the ide-scsi module to /etc/modules or whatever means your distribution has of autoloading modules. Or just type modprobe ide-scsi, which will load the module.

When ide-scsi is loaded for your CDRW you should be able to access the device as /dev/scd0 or /dev/sg0 instead of /dev/hdc.

Håkan