Hardware Exchange from CDR to CD-R/RW

[Rick Stevens]

Chris A Czerwinski wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I would like to exchange my OEM CD-R for a Sony CD-R/RW (CRX140E)
> 
> Will RHL9 (kudzu) recognize this new hardware when I reboot the system?

Yup.

> Do I need Xcdroast to burn my cd's? or which application should I use or
> look into?

Xcdroast works, as does gtoaster and a raft of others (I use gtoaster
most of the time).  Keep in mind that most of these actually use
"cdrecord" to do the actual grunt work--they provide nice GUIs to create
the CD and ISO image, but cdrecord is what actually burns the CD.

> Any pointers or suggestions that I need to be aware of
> prior/during/after this hardware exchange?

Try to jumper the new drive exactly as the old drive and plug it into
the same cable.  Generally, I make my R/RW drives slaves on the second
IDE controller (secondary slaves), however your mileage may vary.

If you plan to duplicate CDs, try to keep the CD and CD-RW on separate
controllers.  If a single controller has to deal with reading from a
slow CD and feeding data to a fast, hungry CDRW, you may easily get a
buffer underrun.  One way to minimize that is to burn the CD at 1/2 the
rate of the CD drive.  In other words, if the CD drive is 24x but your
CD-RW is capable of 40x, make SURE you burn at 12x or less.  If the CD
drive is faster than the CD-RW, then that doesn't apply.

Another option (my preference) is to make an ISO image of the CD onto
the hard disk, then burn the ISO image from the hard disk to the CD-RW.
Hard disks are always faster than CD-RW so the buffer underrun odds are
minimized.

Fortunately, blank CDs are cheap so experiment away.  Experience is the
best teacher with this stuff.
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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-             To iterate is human, to recurse, divine.               -
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