Parallel Port ATAPI CD-R Information Page

 Parallel Port ATAPI CD-R Information

Versions of the Linux kernel later than 2.0.35 or 2.1.107 contain support for parallel port ATAPI CD-R and CD-RW devices, such as the HP 7200e. For best results use 2.0.36 or 2.1.129 or later.

To use these drives, you must build a kernel with PARIDE support, an appropriate PARIDE protocol driver and the pg driver. You must also obtain Joerg Schilling's cdrecord program, version 1.6.1 or later.

XCDroast is based on cdrecord, however, current versions of XCDroast do not support the pg driver.

There may be other CD writing software that also supports pg, but I am not currently aware of any. In particular, please do not expect to find a Linux implementation of UDF, the read/write file system used by Adaptec's Direct CD. You cannot mount pg devices, you must use a program like cdrecord to write to CDs. This is not a restriction of pg - you can't do this with SCSI or ATAPI CD-RW drives, either.

You can obtain cdrecord from:

ftp://ftp.fokus.gmd.de/pub/unix/cdrecord/cdrecord-1.6.1.tar.gz
   

Follow the instructions found in Documentation/paride.txt in your Linux source tree to build and install the PARIDE subsystem.

Please note that PARIDE does not currently support the ECP setting on most parallel ports. For best performance, you should set your parallel port to EPP mode. Note too that the PARIDE drivers have a built-in delay to compensate for many marginal ports. To burn CD-Rs using pg in a non-EPP mode, you will have to be sure to force the delay to 0. Check the comments in the source code of the pg driver.

You should be able to burn CD-Rs at 2x speed in EPP mode with the delay set to 0. In lesser modes, 1x is probably the best you can do. Please use cdrecord's -dummy option to test your setup before wasting media.

If you have an problems with pg, please join our mailing list and post there. If you have a problem with cdrecord, or you can't find it, start here. You might also find that the CD-writing HOWTO contains some useful information.

Visit the paride home page for more information about the paride suite of drivers.

 Small print