Sun CD-ROM FAQ

Last modified: Sat Nov 9 00:46:31 EST 1996

Preface: Introduction & What's New?

Background Information

  1. Where can I find out more?
  2. What are the relevant newsgroups?
  3. As as overview, what are my options for using a CD-ROM on a Sun?
  4. What drives have been shown to work?
  5. What is doomed to fail?
  6. How do I know if my CD-ROM is not natively Sun compatible? What error message is displayed?
  7. What are the specifications of the SunCD, SunCD+, SunCD2+, SunCD4?

Booting a Sun from a Non-Sun CD-ROM

  1. I just modified the drive according to these directions. It boots fine, but I get an "unrecognized vendor" error. Is this a problem?
  2. What do you do if you have an old Sun that doesn't know about boot cdrom (or CD-ROMs for that matter)?
  3. Can I make a bootable tape from a CD?
  4. Not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but why does my AppleCD 300 work for booting and mounting?

Mounting Discs

  1. If I have a drive that has 2048 bytes/block and want to be able to mount it (but not boot), what are my options?
  2. Why does SunOS 4.1.1 bomb when I try to mount CD-ROM discs and what can I do about it?
  3. Why can't I mount certain ISO-9660 discs and what does XAR have to do with it?
  4. How can I set up my kernel and drive to mount all 6 discs from a Pioneer multi-disk CD-ROM reader?
  5. If I mount a PC-format CD, will SoftPC let DOS applications access it?
  6. If none of this works, is there any other way to access a PC CD-ROM?

SunCDs on Other Computers

  1. How do I mount a SunCD on my Macintosh, assuming I have the right cabling?
  2. How do I use a SunCD under DOS?

Multimedia

  1. Can I use a CD-ROM to play audio CD's? What programs are available?
  2. My NEC CDR-1750 works fine as a drive, but I can't get it to play audio CD's with workman, x_cdplayer, etc. How can I get it to work?
  3. Can I record audio tracks on a Sparcstation?
  4. Can I digitize audio tracks over the SCSI bus? (CDDA tracks)
  5. Why can't I read Electronic Books discs?
  6. Why can't I mount any XA discs (such as multisession PhotoCDs)?
  7. Are there any PD/shareware utilities for reading and converting PhotoCD images?
  8. OK, ALREADY! I get the point that multimedia features don't work well with all of the solutions presented above? What are my options?

HOWTOs

  1. Using a Toshiba 3401 CD-ROM Drive on a SPARCstation Running Solaris
  2. Modifying Solaris 2.1 for PC type CD-ROM drives
  3. Modifying Solaris 2.4 to 2.5.1 for PC type CD-ROM drives (Last Modified: November 9th, 1996)


FAQ Maintainers:
Mike Frisch (mfrisch@saturn.tlug.org)
Martin Hargreaves (martin@datamodl.demon.co.uk)