[Gllug] cdrecord and atip/writing speed problems

[Ian Northeast]

Martyn Drake wrote:

> I just wish I could burn CDs through one of my VMWare Windows 2000
> sessions right now, but of course CD-RW is not supported even in raw
> access mode under VMWare 3.0.

This is on my list of things to test with VMWare 3.0 so I gave it a
quick whirl and it worked, but:

The CD writer is a real SCSI connected as a generic device;
The guest was Linux (Debian Potato);
I only wrote the 30M Debian netstart CD, as a quick test;
I only used 4x (the maximum stated for the rewritable I am using to test
with);
I didn't actually try to install Debian from the resulting CD, just
mounted it and looked through it, it appeared to be OK;
I tried copying an audio CD in this VM last weekend as my fist test of
generic SCSI device mapping and it failed, with an I/O error on the
writer, but I think I ripped the original in the VM too and it may have
been faulty. I've deleted it now.

I see that the VMware documentation states in the CD/DVD section that CD
writers are not supported as writers, but in the section on SCSI generic
devices they refrain from all mention of them.

So maybe this is something which works but is a bit flaky.

You said earlier that your writer is an IDE with IDE-SCSI. Can you map
such a beast as a generic SCSI in VMware? I have no means of telling as
I don't use it. But logically I would have thought you could; the real
SCSI adapter here is an Adaptec and the VMware one is a Buslogic, so
there has to be some virtualisation. It's not going down to the adapter
level. Does an IDE-SCSI device show as a generic SCSI device? If so you
could try to map it as such, rather than a raw CD. It might work.

I may give this a better test at the weekend. I might even install some
CD writing software into a virtual Windows. There's that software which
came with the drive which I ignored:)

Regards, Ian

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