> This is just a little inconsistency.
> I have a CD that somebody burned for me, and it's possible that it was not
> correctly written. However, the Linux SCSI driver and MSDOS seem to be
> able to read the CD fine. The Linux ATAPI CD driver pukes and gags at the
> CD and complains about the iso9660 fs on the disk to be incorrect. Any
> ideas why this is happening?
Two possibilities...
1) What color is the CD. (Yes, I said what color).
There are three common dye medias you are likely to encounter,
differentiated by their color. You may find Yellow (Gold), Green, and Blue.
Gold is typically the least expensive and longer lived than the Green. The
Green is currently the "most popular" but is slightly more expensive than
the Gold, has a shorter life expectancy, but has much better compatibility
than does the Gold. The Blue is manufactured only by Verbatum although
it is remarketed under numerous other labels. In quantity, it can be cheaper
than the Green with all the better compatibility with older drives and yet
it is promoted as having a longer data life than even the yellow. All will
outlive me... My personal preference is the Blue Verbatum (or whatever label
the blue is available under).
If the color of the recording layer is Yellow and you have an older
(or just fussier) drive, you may have a media compatibility problem. This is
pretty much a well known compatibility problem between "Gold CD's" and older
Audio CD players and older CD Roms. Some drives get fussy if they get dirty
and make them more sensitive to problems with Gold CD's.
That being said - I would probably guess that this is NOT likely to
be your problem though...
2) Data padding...
Most data CD's have a runout datapad of anywhere from 30K to 300K
of zero's following the ISO 9660 image. The problem comes in with some of
the drivers which attempt to cache "read-ahead" and read past the end of
the file system. If it's padded, no harm done. If it's not, you can have
totally bogus errors. It could be that the IDE driver is attempting to
read-ahead and running into an End Of Media error off the end of the data
track. The SCSI driver may be behaving a little better.
My guess would be that you most likely have a CD with an ISO 9660
file system which was not padded out with zeros when cut. The SCSI driver
is handling this properly while the IDE driver is blowing and error at EOM.
I ran into a REAL problem with a pressing house one time when I did
NOT add that padding to my data. They insisted that they would not even
press the CD's because some CD drives would not read them without that
padding. They remaster three of my masters before consulting me and totally
screwed the RockRidge extensions. They ended up eating over 3000 pressed
CD's and paying for shipping replacements. I now pad ALL of my masters
with 300K of zeros and they won't even think about remastering my masters
even at gun point! The cdwrite utility will only pad with 30K of zeros
(the mastering house INSISTED on 300K - 150 2K blocks - go figure...). I
ended up modifing cdwrite to pad out by 300K just to make sure these clowns
would never even be tempted.
> -bc
Mike
-- Michael H. Warfield | (770) 985-6132 | mhw@WittsEnd.com (The Mad Wizard) | (770) 925-8248 | http://www.wittsend.com/mhw/ NIC whois: MHW9 | An optimist believes we live in the best of all PGP Key: 0xDF1DD471 | possible worlds. A pessimist is sure of it!