Changing drives

[Mike A. Harris]

On Tue, 16 Sep 2003, Maynard Kuona wrote:

>I came across one of the ugly faces of Linux recently when I changed
>around some drives. I had gotten rid of one of my hard drives, and then,
>I had to change one of my optical drives to become a master. I chose to
>change the cd writer.
>
>All was well until it got to the part where I needed to burn something.
>But the drive was not appearing in any of the places for the Nautilus cd
>burner. I was stumped for a while, trying to figure this ine out. It
>took me the better part of an afternoon to actually figure out that I
>had to change the extra parameter I was passing to the kernel at boot in
>Grub, to enable scsi emulation for the drive.
>
>Linux will never be easy enough for the masses if stuff like this still
>has to be configured. The problem would have been in two parts here.
>Even if the burner had been autodetected nciley, and Grub reconfigured
>automatically, it would have required a reboot, because hardware
>detection takes place after these parameters have been passed to the
>kernel. Or maybe new drivers are needed for us to not have to use scsi
>emulation. Any thought on this please. I found it frustrating though.

Have you disabled "kudzu" at boot time?  CD burner autodetection 
works fine for me and always has for years.

For what it's worth, SCSI emulation for CD burners is on it's way 
out anyway.  The 2.6.x kernel burns CDs without using SCSI 
emulation.


-- 
Mike A. Harris     ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat