I want to install my old HP CD-Writer plus 7200 on my computer running Mandrake 9.0, I looked at the suported hardware page in the documentation and it says that the 7200i is supported, there is no i on my CD-Writer so I'm a little confused about that.
So first of all, is what I am trying to do possible?
And second, where do I begin? if someone can tell me how to do it or point me in the direction of some good documentation that would be good.

If its an IDE cdrw built after 1999, its supported, almost hands down. The kernel is going to recognize it as a scsi device, but you'll have to add:

append="hdh=ide-scsi"

To /etc/lilo.conf and then re-run lilo with the command "/sbin/lilo"

/dev/hdh is also just my cdrw, yours is probably /dev/hdc... Also all the desktop links and the info in /etc/fstab that Mandy prebuilt for you will be wrong and you'll have to change them to /dev/scd0 (probably)

GUI burner programs like gcombust, xcdroast, and k3b (which rules, but is never on anything by default, looks just like Nero), should autodetect the drive.

Cheers,

Finegan

I forgot to mention, its an external drive connected via a parallel port, what diffrence with this make to what I need to do?

Okay, entirely different story now... sortof.

modprobe pg
modprobe paride
modprobe epat

As far as I can tell those are the right kids for the job... if you have kernel source on your machine, you may want to look at the kernel documentation under:

/usr/src/linux/Documentation/paride.txt

This one isn't going to flat simple, but it'll definately be fun! If it doesn't recognize the burner aspect of it, it'll probably register as /dev/hde, if it does it'll compefully be /dev/scd0.

Cheers,

Finegan

Tired those commands and they seemed to work fine, that is, they didnt return errors
What do I do now?

Check:

dmesg

and see what the device was registered as, probably /dev/hde, but who knows, you could post the end of dmesg here if you like...

You should be able to put a data CD in it and mount it with: mount /dev/hde /mnt/somewhere

Cheers,

Finegan