[gentoo-amd64] Re: dvdrw drive not visible

[Duncan]

Daiajo Tibdixious <daiajo@×××××.com> posted
a4a9bfcb0905032003i26abb9ccj4d7c7422bc466daa@××××××××××.com, excerpted
below, on  Mon, 04 May 2009 03:03:02 +0000:

> On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 12:19 AM, Drake Donahue <donahue95@×××××××.net>
> wrote:
>> On Tue, 2009-04-28 at 22:02 +0000, Daiajo Tibdixious wrote:
>>> When I boot off the live CD there is a /dev/hda /dev/cdrom /dev/cdrw
>>> /dev/dvd /dev/dvdrw etc & it works just fine.
>>>
>>> When I boot off my kernel there are no such devices & I can't use the
>>> drive.
>>>
>>> This is the same drive as in my old system, which just worked with no
>>> tweaking before.
>>>
>>> Obviously I am missing some driver, yet I have grovelled thru
>>> menuconfig to no avail.
>>> Google turns up many similar problems, however none have been helpful.
>>>
>>> If I boot off the live cd, is there a way to see what options I need?
>>>
>>> The drive shows as "PIONEER DVD-RW DVR-109" on the live cd.

Just saw this again after your reply to DD.  I think you're correct, the 
device isn't showing up (missing driver), so it's not even getting to the 
hal/dbus stage.

I just googled that drive, ATAPI/IDE it looks like, right?

IDE can use two different driver sets in the kernel.  There's still the 
old IDE drivers (ATA/ATAPI/MFM/RLL support), but there's also the libata 
based drivers (Serial ATA (prod) and Parallel ATA (experimental) 
drivers).  The latter are what most folks (including me) use these days.  
Let's see if I can find the stuff in my kernel config that the ATAPI DVD-
Writers use:

Under Device Drivers:

As mentioned, the SATA/PATA option, which simply enables that entire 
submenu to be chosen from.  

Under SATA/PATA support, ATA SFF support, which again, enables a whole 
list of individual device drivers to be chosen from.

Under ATA SFF, choose your specific hardware drivers.  Here, I have 
Silicon Image SATA support for my SATA ports (symbol SATA_SIL, which 
would be unrelated to anything IDE except that they still use the legacy 
SFF interface, thus they are listed under ATA SFF) and AMD/NVidia PATA 
support for my legacy PATA ports, which is what my DVD-writers are on.

Of course you will most likely have different hardware, but if you're 
using the newer SATA/PATA option and SFF, as would be recommended if you 
have SATA ports at all so as to avoid having both that and the legacy IDE 
drivers, it will likely be found here, under ATA SFF.

If you don't see your specific hardware, Generic ATA support should work 
using the BIOS config, altho it's possible/likely you won't get full 
speed DMA without the chipset specific drivers.  If you end up using the 
generic option and don't get full speed, google your specific board model 
at google.com/linux (thus limiting it to the Linux subdomain and reducing 
your general and MS platform hits), and see if you get anything useful, 
or post the board and/or chipset model here and ask.  You could of course 
try the older IDE drivers as well, but I'd suggest avoiding it if 
possible, if you're already using SATA on the same board, as is likely on 
AMD64 and newer hardware.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman