Member Avatar for kc0arf

Good Morning,

Wondering if anyone has had any preferences with DVD burners under Linux. Either SCSI or IDE is fine with me. I would like to take advantage of the various sales out there for a decent DVD burner, but all of the boxes say Windoze.... Am wondering if anyone has had success with off-the-shelf DVD burners and various drivers to get them working over Linux.

Thanks.

Christian

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A concise companion for Red Hat 9 users who want to confirm a new burner will work and to troubleshoot common problems. and have already shown that many consumer drives can be usable; below are practical checks, quick commands, and gotchas specific to getting a burner recognized and writing reliably on an RH9-era system.

Start by verifying kernel/device detection and the node you should use:

dmesg | tail -n 40
tail -f /var/log/messages     # watch while you plug/boot the drive
lsmod | egrep 'usb|sbp2|cdrom|ide'
ls -l /dev | egrep 'sr|cd|hd'
cat /proc/sys/dev/cdrom/info  # if present

If the drive is external, confirm the appropriate transport module is loaded (USB mass-storage or FireWire sbp2). Identify the correct device node (for example an IDE device vs a SCSI/USB device) before attempting writes.

Tips for burning and avoiding common failures:

  • Create and inspect an ISO first (mkisofs) and then burn with a DVD-aware writer (growisofs or the distro’s GUI tools). Use a conservative write speed on first tries.
  • If the drive is not appearing: check BIOS for drive/IDE settings, verify the kernel modules mentioned above, and review /var/log/messages for chipset/vendor IDs to look up compatibility.
  • Permission problems are common on older installs; burning tools often need raw-device access (run as root or ensure the user is in the cdrom group).
  • If persistent errors occur, check for firmware updates from the vendor (apply with care), try different brand media, and test writes at lower speeds to rule out media/drive/connection faults.

For the system in this thread, the combination of a drive that mounts on another OS plus the checks above will narrow any Linux-specific issue quickly and point to whether a driver/module, permission, firmware, or media problem is the root cause.

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Member Avatar for movielad

Good Morning,

Wondering if anyone has had any preferences with DVD burners under Linux. Either SCSI or IDE is fine with me. I would like to take advantage of the various sales out there for a decent DVD burner, but all of the boxes say Windoze.... Am wondering if anyone has had success with off-the-shelf DVD burners and various drivers to get them working over Linux.

Thanks.

Christian

I've never had any problems with Pioneers or NEC ND1/2xxxx models - they've all performed well under Red Hat 7.2 and XCDRoast with CDrecordPRO so I don't see any reason for them not to work for you. I'd avoid the Sony DRU-500A however as I've had problems with that, but not the DRU-510A which has been fine.

Regards,

Martyn

Member Avatar for kc0arf

Hello,

I ended up getting a Sony DRU-540, it has USB and Firewire. Worked great out-of-box with my Mac, and will be trying it on the Linux box in short order.

Thanks for the note.

Christian

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