stefanlasiewski's Journal: Linux drives me crazy.... I just want my CD Burner to work!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!!!!!!!!

Days like today make me wonder why I use Linux.

A few weeks ago, I hit a wierd bug with 'cd'. Basically, I went (as root, from the root homedir):

[~]# cd /foo/bar
[~]# blah blah blah
[~]# cd -
[/]# chown -r root *

What I didn't notice was at the 'cd -' step, I was somehow dumped into / instead of /root. As a result, I changed the ownership of hundreds of files to 'root' before I noticed.

So my system is functional, but certain commands aren't working very well, because they need files owned by someone like 'daemon' or whatnot.

Well, I run RedHat 7.2. And since RedHat 9 was going to come out soon, I decided to not reinstall 7.2, and just upgrade to RedHat 9.

Yesterday, my RH 9 CD's arrived from CheapBytes. Groovy.

So today, I get ready to upgrade my system to RedHat 9. "This shouldn't take more then 2 hours" I thought...

I had problems when upgrading from 7.1 to 7.2, and lost some data-- Moving to from LILO GRUB hosed my MBR, to the point where neither the Win98 nor the LILO bootloader could *write* to the bootsector... really wierd.

Since I got burned before, I decide to save a bunch of files (/etc/ for future reference and /home/, and some other stuff) using my brand new CD Burner!

And then I enter this nightmare world of installing kernel support for the CD Burner. Some odd facts:

- Linux doesn't support IDE Burners, so you need to run an IDE-SCSI emulation somethingrather.
- The Documentation on how to do this is nearly 3 years old, and only talks about the Linux2.2 kernel. I can't be sure if the stuff I'm reading is accurate for my 2.4 system. Maybe it's fine, I don't know.

I've recompliled the Kernel several times today, with the correct modules (I think). I reboot, the new kernel loads, and I get odd errors like this:

Kernel command line: auto BOOT_IMAGE=linux-2.4.18-18 ro root=1605 BOOT_FILE=/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.18-18.7.xcustom options ide-cd ignore=hdd alias scd0 sr_mod
ide_setup: ide-cd -- BAD OPTION

Arg! Ok ok, so the documentation told me to use ide-cd as a module, but I compiled it into the Kernel. I'm bad. Still, since ide-cd is compiled into the kernel, it should still work. Right? RIGHT?

But all the other modules loaded fine, but I still can't get cdrecord to recognize see my drive!

[~]# cdrecord -scanbus
Cdrecord 1.10 (i686-pc-linux-gnu) Copyright (C) 1995-2001 Jörg Schilling
cdrecord: No such file or directory. Cannot open SCSI driver.
cdrecord: For possible targets try 'cdrecord -scanbus'. Make sure you are root.

ARG!!! Ok, ok: Maybe I missed a module somewhere. So I go through "make xconfig" for the kernel again, look for anything I miss, change ide-cd to be a module instead of part of the kernel.

Now, I'm rebuilding the kernel, again, and now I'm getting "unresolved symbol with CONFIG_X86_SPEEDSTEP" problems during "make modules_install". What the heck is Speedstep? I go back to the documenttation, only to find no information for Speedstep whatsoever.

The compile survived through an hour of "make dep, make bzImage, make install, make modules", but failed in the very last step...

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!!!!!!!!

So here I am, a beautiful Sunny day outside, and I've spent the last 4 hours trying to figure out how to make my CD/RW work with Linux.

uhh

[GreyWolf3000]

make sure you don't include IDE/ATAPI CDROM support. Include SCSI emulation. Then you want to enable generic SCSI, SCSI CDROM support, then maybe vendor-specific extensions (read the help on menuconfig or xconfig to see if you need it).

Re:uhh

[stefanlasiewski]

make sure you don't include IDE/ATAPI CDROM support.

I have a second IDE CDROM drive. Pretty sure I still need the IDE/ATAPI CDROM support for that drive?

Still, it might be worth a try...

Re:uhh

[GreyWolf3000]

just try without that support...also pass ide-scsi to "append=" in /etc/lilo.conf if you haven't already

Is it about the files or getting it to work?

[Mac Degger]

If it's about the files, I suggest dumping in a second HD as slave and just copy all the files that way. Then just fdisk and format (or the other way 'round, whichever you prefer 8P) and install RH9.

OTOH, if it's about getting it to work, more power to you; just remember that due to the re-attribuition (is that a word?) you might never get it to work correctly in your hosed RH7.2...

Grub

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

If I were you, I'd save my files to /home/usernamewhatever and install Redhat 9, formatting everyting but /home/usernamewhatever. Make sure you have ide-scsi emulation in Grub. www.linuxquestions.org has helped tme through quite a few bad patches w/ Linux. Check it out.