5.6 CD-RW

In order for the built in CD-RW to be recognized, you will need to enable SCSI generic support (within the SCSI support section) in the kernel. In addition, you should also enable SCSI emulation support, within the IDE, ATA and ATAPI Block devices section.

Even though the CD-RW is actually an IDE device, we need to emulate it as a SCSI driver, as no driver is available for the CD-RW as an ATAPI device. The above steps are described only if you choose to custom build your own kernel. If you choose not to, these options will already be available, as modules. RedHat, for example, configures the CD-RW automagically.

The last step is to pass hdc=ide-scsi to your kernel when it boots up. If you use LILO, you should add it as such (from a RedHat system, for example):

image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.7-10
        label=RH72
        initrd=/boot/initrd-2.4.7-10.img
        read-only
        root=/dev/hda6
        append="hdc=ide-scsi pci=biosirq"

If using Grub, you should configure it as such:

title           Debian GNU/Linux 2.4.18
root            (hd0,1)
kernel          /vmlinuz-2.4.18 root=/dev/hda6 hdc=ide-scsi ro

Don't simply copy and paste the above examples into the appropriate LILO or Grub configuration files! You should simply incorporate hdc=ide-scsi, as shown in the above examples.

You should probably already have cdrecord installed on your system. Asking cdrecord to search for CD-RW's on your SCSI chain can be done by:

# cdrecord -scanbus

You should see output similar to the following.

scsibus0:
        0,0,0     0) 'HL-DT-ST' 'RW/DVD GCC-4080N' '0010' Removable CD-ROM
        0,1,0     1) *
        0,2,0     2) *
        0,3,0     3) *
        0,4,0     4) *
        0,5,0     5) *
        0,6,0     6) *
        0,7,0     7) *

You may then use the CD-RW normally...