[lug] CD-R drives?

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Mon, Oct 18, 1999 at 10:34:45PM -0600, socket at peakpeak.com wrote:
>"SectorIDNotFound" and such things that seem innocuous because fsck
>doesn't complain every bootup.  However, I have had three major fsck

fsck only checks to see if the file-system is marked as clean, normally.
This is just a byte in the superblock -- it doesn't actually do a scan.
To scan the drive, you probably want to boot up with an install or rescue
disc, and run "badblocks" *WITHOUT THE WRITE OPTION*.  It will actually
try reading every sector on the drive.

If you've done a backup recently, you can do it with the write option to
read and write several bit-patterns to the drive for a more thorough test.

>got a lemon here.  I'm interested in purchasing a CD-R(W?)  now,

I'd HIGHLY recommend the "Vendor: MITSUMI  Model: CR-4802TE".  It's
IDE, 4x write, 2x re-write, 8x read, and works flawlessly.  It also
can be found mail-order for $150 or less...  I've burned probably 100
or more discs in the last month on it and had 0 problems.  Speaking of
which, I need to start a burn right now.

You have to make sure to build your (2.2) kernel with ide-cdrom and
ide-scsi as modules.  To use the ide-scsi you have to rmmod the ide-cd
and modprobe the ide-scsi.  You burn with the SCSI module, and can do
regular access, but there's been some speculation that ripping is happier
if done with the ide-cd module.

I was skeptical of the performance of an IDE CD burner, but so far it's
been a lot better than either of my SCSI burners (Older Yamaha which
frequently wrote corrupted discs without any indication of doing so,
and a brand new Plextor 8/20 which Plextor is having "issues" repairing).

>Advice welcome, on CD-Rs and new desktop system recommendations.

Build your own?  :-)

Sean
-- 
 Think.
Sean Reifschneider, Inimitably Superfluous <jafo at tummy.com>
URL: <http://www.tummy.com/xvscan> HP-UX/Linux/FreeBSD/BSDOS scanning software.