[lug] CDRW with linux

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Thu, Sep 21, 2000 at 09:28:46AM -0600, Jeff Howell wrote:
>I burn CDs all the time under Linux. I'm using a Plexstor 4x scsi writer.

Short form: I have a PlexWriter 8x20 which is scheduled to go up to wyoming
and get shot full of holes this weekend.

There have been two CD-ROM drives that have given me fits: an ancient
Yamaha (wouldn't record reliably under Linux, I ended up using Windows
much of the time) and my Plextor 8x20.

The Plextor worked fantasticly for about the first 6 months I had it.
I figured it was a safe bet since the author of cdrecord had one as
well.  I was tired of software problems that plauged the Yamaha.
So I paid a premium for the 8x20.  For a while I was using it to rip
CDs into MP3s.  I started one rip and when I came back after the weekend,
it was still trying to read the disc, but was generating all sorts of
errors.

The short story is that after that incident I was never able to successfully
burn.  Plextor didn't want to talk to me unless I could reproduce the problem
under Windows.  I finally got them to take it on RMA because it was acting
funny at the firmware level (blinking error codes it seemed like).
Unfortunately, it seems they sent the drive back without doing anything
to it.  I've tried it in several different machines all with the same result.

Plextors nice, but they don't want to talk to the Linux community.  I've
actually had really good luck with the Mitsumi IDE CDRW drives (we have 4,
one of which has croaked), and the Pioneer 8x CDRW SCSI drives (we have
another 4 of these).  Plextor was copping out with "You're using bad media",
but we've never had a problem with another drive handling various types
of media.  We've probably burned 1500 discs in these drives.

Sean
-- 
 "The great thing about Meat Loaf is he's his own special effect." -- J.S.
Sean Reifschneider, Inimitably Superfluous <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com - Linux Consulting since 1995. Qmail, KRUD, Firewalls, Python