Hi Charles Angelich, hope you are having a nice day

PW>> Considering I had to apply some 5meg(compressed) of patches
88
PW>>in practice the adaptec/roxio ecdc/dcd is a waste of space. 
CA>Not on all hardware. On an HP 800mhz W98SE install it works
CA>every time no problems. 

 Well it seems to me that if you buy something like a cdrw and it
comes w/ matching sw that it oughta work out of the box like the
docs say it's supposed to. Anything else is deceptive advertising
to me. (which is why i'll *not* recommend h45 technologies products)

 My setup met the listed requirements for os and hardware, to then
have to get on the net and find a mess of updates just to get the sw
to even *recognize* the drive, much less work w/ it..

PW>> The cdrecord programs I've still not been able to do what I
PW>>need w/ cd-rw blanks but otoh full speed cd-r burns haven't
PW>>been a bust. (i need to be able to read files from a cd-rw
PW>>disk in dos only and os/2 systems w/o a udf/packet driver) 
CA>Your 'needs' are a bit unusual. Any time you're dealing with
CA>recently developed technology you want a recent OS to go with
CA>it if at all possible. 

 Why should I need the `latest and greatest' for something which 
others are already and have been doing for years. The ability to
write to a cdrw blank the same format as a cdr blank isn't that
complex a thing, and doesn't seem to be a problem for other people.
The only diff 'tween the media is that once I'm done getting the files
from point a to point b I can wipe the cdrw disk and start over w/
a new batch of files.

 Cheaper that way too. Figure reusing a cdrw blank 1000x vs using 1000
cdr blanks for temp data and it adds up. $$$$ is something I have to
be *extremely* tight on these days. When my g'mom passed away at the end
of oct. it cut the gross household income literally in half, the bills
however didn't reciprocate one bit. I now have to manage on $552/mo.
and so far each month has totaled closer to $750 in expenses each month.

PW>> The system is a PII/300 laptop w/ 160meg ram and the drive
PW>>originally used a usb or pcmcia card interface, but since
PW>>it's a `laptop' sized drive I converted the fixed 24x cd
PW>>bay into a swappable drive bay so the burner is now master
PW>>(and only) drive on the secondary ide bus. 
CA>Not very knowledgeable here about all this swapping around of
CA>hardware and software but I seem to recall that burners can be
CA>sensitive to where they are in relation to the master hard

 Yep. The usual reccomendation is that if you've the hd (c:\) as
the master drive on the primary ide bus to put the cdrw as master
on the secondary bus. (personally i prefer scsi but in the case of
the 2x2x6x in this box and the 4x4x24x in the laptop you go w/ what
you can get/afford)

 The drive I got for the laptop (matshita ujda320) is the same
size as what they install in more recent cdrw equipped laptops
and uses the same ide setup. The adapters it came w/ are a usb
to ide and a pcmcia to ide. Once I saw it had the same connector
in the same place as on the 24x cd that the laptop came w/ it
wasn't that big a thing to figure I could get away w/ switching.
(if i could get a cdrw/dvd combo drive or even just a dvd i'd be
all set)

 I figure that all things being equal, it would work a lot better
tied directly to the busmastered secondary ide port than it would
trying to work thru a usb1.1 port or the pcmcia port even though the
pcmcia is a cardbus compliant one. (ie 32bit bus vs the 16bit of pcmcia)

 What I think the adaptec sw really needs is the right .inf for the
drive so that '98 will see it as a cdrw on startup rather than just a
24x cd. (of all the drivers included for the usb and pcmcia stuff the
one driver or .inf *not* found was one for the drive itself) :/

CA>drive. Burning CDs is time-critical and any interruptions or
CA>pauses will create coasters. CD burning is not fault-tolerant,
CA>generally, but I see now many are increasing the installed
CA>buffers in the CD burner itself to ease this 'pain'. :-) 

 This is why I like CDRecord over adaptec. Neither of my cdrw's are
advanced enough to have buffer underrun protection so it's easy to
make a coaster if things aren't just so. W/ cdrecord however it doesn't
matter what size the buffer is in the drive. When I did the 2 cdr burns
using cdrecord I had it set an external fifo buffer that was 32meg in
size to go along w/ the tiny 1.8meg(2meg) buffer contained inside the
cdrw. End result was I got a msg at the end telling me that the buffer
only dropped to 99% full one time. ]:>

 It should be possible to do what I want w/ using a cdrw blank like
a cdr and 'ccording to the faq and all is possible. But being it's
originally a *nix program the docs are a little confusing abt some 
things. ;>

 Like how to make a multi os bootable cd. Seems you can make a self
booting (el torito) cd that will let you choose from 255 diff os's
to boot from. (way cool if you need a recovery cd for a mess of diff
systems) Unfortunatly it doesn't explain *how* to do this. :/

 Since you're into *nix you might give the package a look see.
(http://demosten.com/ should get you close)
I'm using the '9x (cygwin) port... version.. 1.10 for cdrecord,
1.14 for mkisofs, 1.23 for cdda2wav, and 1.1b3 of the gui frontend.
Dunno what the current versions are.

 -=> Yours sincerely, Paul Williams <=-

... "Yup, shooting blanks again." *sigh* --K'vin
--- Terminate 4.00/Pro