9.3.1 Introduction

First, any disruption of data sent to the CD-writer will cause irrecoverable damage to the CD. Get a CD-writer with as large a buffer as possible. If money is no object, do not bother with ATAPI/IDE, just get a SCSI version. If you have a choice of IDE interface to be connected, use the one on the PCI-bus (i.e., on the motherboard) rather than one on the ISA-bus (an SB16 card, etc.).

When a CD-writer is connected to IDE, it has to be driven by the IDE-SCSI driver instead of an ordinary IDE CD driver for Linux 2.2 and 2.4 kernels. Also, the SCSI generic driver needs to be activated. There are two possible approaches to doing this, assuming a kernel distributed with modern distributions (as of March 2001).

For Linux 2.6 kernel, you should use ordinary IDE driver and access CD-RW device directly with device name such as /dev/hdx instead. You can use DMA this way.