9 Apr
2002
9 Apr
'02
3:37 p.m.
It's likely that if your CD-RW drive is a SCSI type, you'll be able to do what
you want. If it's an IDE type, you'll probably best forget it.
I've got no experience with CD-RW's, but LOTS of it with CD-R's, and I've
followed the development of CR-RW and DVD-R drives with considerable interest.
However, I'm not a CD-RW fan because of the media cost.
If the drive manufacturer can profide the command set and you can figure out
how to create a driver for it for the target environment, you can do what you
want. However, there's lots of learning curve. We struggled for three years
just getting a standard adopted for bootable CD's. I suspect this may get to
be even more tangled.
Dick
----- Original Message -----
From: "Christopher Smith" <csmith(a)amdocs.com>
To: "Classiccmp (E-mail)" <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org>
Sent: Tuesday, April 09, 2002 2:17 PM
Subject: Half on, half off -- New CD-R drive and 512-byte blocks
Hi everybody. This isn't strictly on topic, but I
think the intent
of the question makes it close enough.
I just bought a new CD-RW drive -- a Sony CRX145s -- and am curious
about whether it may read the 512-byte blocks necessary for using it
as a backup boot device on my VAXen, Sparc, SGI, etc.
Does anyone know whether this, or just for information, some other
CD-RW unit, will do such a thing?
Note that I do know that discs are written in 2048 byte blocks, and
the answer won't affect its performance in writing disks on these
systems. I am also aware that doing this for the long term may
needlessly shorten the life of the drive. As I said above, it is
more for curiosity, and eventually I would like to know that in case
my RRD42 dies, I have a backup. :)
Chris
Christopher Smith, Perl Developer
Amdocs - Champaign, IL
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'