I can't use cdrecord with my usb cdrw drive

[hazel]

I am having trouble writing to a cdrw drive (AOpen EHW5224U) connected via a usb port. I can do it in nautilus but I don't like having to use nautilus, which is slow to load and mucks up my fluxbox desktop.

In Red Hat, using a 2.4 kernel, I used to use cdrecord for this kind of thing. Now with Ubuntu Dapper, using a 2.6.15 kernel, cdrecord doesn't work. It gives a warning of incompatibility with 2.6 kernels and then spews out the following errors:

Starting new track at sector: 0
Track 01: 3 of 584 MB written (fifo 100%) [buf 31%] 7.1x.cdrecord: \Input/output error. write_g1: scsi sendcmd: no error
CDB: 2A 00 00 00 06 4C 00 00 1F 00
status: 0x2 (CHECK CONDITION)
Sense Bytes: F0 00 05 00 00 08 5A 0C 00 00 00 00 10 02 00 00
Sense Key: 0x5 Illegal Request, segment 0
Sense Code: 0x10 Qual 0x02 (id crc or ecc error) [No matching qualifier] Fru 0x0Sense flags: Blk 2138 (valid)
cmd finished after 0.065s timeout 40s

write track data: error after 3301376 bytes
cdrecord: a write error occurred.
cdrecord: Please properly read the error message above.

I tried using cdread instead but that expects a parallel port connection so it doesn't detect the drive. Does anyone know how to cure this - or another way to write to this kind of drive?

[daark.child]

What were the commands you used to burn the disc? Have you tried using a newer distro because there were problems with cdrecord which resulted in a fork of the original code (apparently the author refused to fix it so it worked properly with Linux). I don't think dapper uses the newer app which is called wodim (running cdrecord on most modern distros calls wodim).

[hazel]

I used mkisofs to make the image, then cdrecord -eject -v speed=24 dev=1,0,0 filename.iso, where 24 is the recording speed written on the front of the drive and 1,0,0 is the scsi device info returned by cdrecord -scanbus.

Are you saying I have to upgrade Ubuntu to get a version of cdrecord that actually works? It sounds rather like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. One of the things I used to hate about Windows was the constant pressure to upgrade.

Incidently I just checked for wodim using synaptic and you're right - there isn't a Dapper version of this program. I wonder if getting it from source would be the best solution; I have compiled source code before, though never on Ubuntu.

EDIT: I just checked: the earliest version that includes wodim is feisty, so I would have to do a double upgrade! Not a desirable option!

[hazel]

Problem solved! I downloaded source code for cdrkit (the replacement for cdrtools that contains wodim in place of cdrecord) and, after a few abortive attempts, managed to compile it. Then I ran wodim on my usb drive and it worked perfectly. Thanks daark_child!

[daark.child]

I'm glad to have helped.