CD Burner Testing

to test a burner

NOTE: have fun

testing CD-RWs?

• First off find a cdrw and a blank

!try the store for those items most of the time!

• Plug in the burner into the IDE cable.
  • The drive should be set to master

     You can see what /var/log/dmesg has to say by reading the file 
     all though typing the command
       
           dmesg | grep RW 

     might be faster.

Login as guest. password is freegeek you should be at a command prompt now it probably looks like

   guest@yoyo:~$ 

that just means it's ready for you to tell it what to do. We will be using a few commands for this.

 this howto asumes you know the basic linux file tree stucture
 and a little about ISO bootable images. 

if you don't know about the command-line burning tool cdrecord you will soon. To keep things simple that tool is the one we will use. ;-)

  type cdrecord -scanbus
  then hit enter.

   The output should look somthing like this
   
       scsibus0:
       0,0,0     0) 'IDE-CD  ' 'R/RW 4x4x24     ' '1.08' 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) *

what you are looking for is th "0,0,0" part if it bites back and tells you it can't find anything it's either not a burner or to old to work or just dead.

• now man cdrecord... Just kidding you really don't have to, but should.

     cdrecord dev=0,0,0 /some/place/where/the/iso/is.iso

I will break the prior line down for you. this is the usual syntax of cdrecord so if you just type cdrecord then enter it will complain about somthing. so you need to feed the command more commands or i will use the word arguments 'cuz that's what they are. So the dev=x,x,x (I used x here to let you know it's not always but in this case will be zero) is the device to use (x,x,x = scsibus,target,lun if you wanted to know). Now the /some/place/some/where.iso is the place in the file system where the ISO is located each ISO set is in its own directory for containment reasons. So if there are three ISOs in one directory (1.iso 2.iso 3.iso) you should burn all three of them. there are two main directories where the ISOs are located /iso-store and /ISOS from there you should just probe 'til you find something good (use the command ls or learn the magic of TAB, or ask the store for what they need. You also Get the blank CDs from the store. (DO NOT STEAL THEM YOU WILL BE HURT BADLY WITH GUILT!(and my poor grammer))

always have fun in anything you do

• you should also check the md5sums

but thats a whole nother store.