Re: How to make DVD/RW drive work with e.g., Slackware 12.

john@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx staggered into the Black Sun and said:
Grant wrote:
Peter Chant wrote:
Dances With Crows wrote:
Yes, you have to do this. However, if it can boot from CD and not
boot from DVD, BIOS boot order is not the problem.

You haven't made the problems that this DVD+-RW is having clear. Can it
read CD-R*s? Can it read DVD+-Rs? Can it read DVD-ROMs? The answers
to these questions will determine what you need to do.

Alternate slack-12 boot methods are available, PXE and USB, in the
usb-and-pxe-installers directory on the install DVD. See the READMEs.
Here is another thought. Can I just mount the dvd image on /mnt/cdrom
and then install from that?

Highly possible.

That doesn't attack the larger problem of how to get the DVD drive
working in DVD mode, however. My bios dates to 2000 and it doesn't
have a DVD device as a boot option, only CDR.

This shouldn't matter. Both DVDs and CDs typically use El Torito
emulation, and that's all the BIOS sees. From the BIOS's point of view,
a DVD is just a larger CD.

I can't do anything with a movie DVD either.

If this is the case, you should have said something about it in your
*first message*. All movie DVDs have UDF filesystems on them. If you
insert a movie DVD into a working Linux box with a DVD-+RW, then "mount
/dev/hdN /mnt/somewhere", it should work. Note that you must replace
/dev/hdN with the name of the DVD-+RW (/dev/hdc is common, check the
output of "dmesg | grep DVD" for the full scoop.) If it doesn't work,
then try dd'ing the first few K off of /dev/hdN. If *that* returns an
I/O error, it is highly probable that the drive itself is mechanically
hosed. Hope you saved the receipt in that case.

--
I have had to deal with kangaroos, donkeys, cows, wild pigs
and some press leaks by former Vice President Cheney.
--MegaHAL, trained on ASR
Matt G|There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see
.

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