[BioBrew Users] Suitable DVD drives

[J.W. Bizzaro]

Greetings.

We tried installing BioBrew 3.0-beta from DVD (the only option) on a 
computer with a cheap (Dynex) DVD/R/RW drive, and the install process 
actually stops and asks for a device driver disk.

We tried finding a device driver for the DVD drive, which is apparently 
made by a European company called "BTC", model 1108IM.  They have 
drivers only for MS-Windows, and based on a offical response, have no 
plans to create one for Linux.  We then searched for a generic driver on 
the Internet, but the only one we found is a generic one usually built 
into the Linux kernel, except apparently for BioBrew (and Rocks ?), but 
it is built into the Fedora Core 2 kernel that we were able to 
successfully install on the system.

We found reference to a similar problem in the Rocks (not BioBrew) 
manual, whereby during installation the system wants a device driver 
disk inserted.  Rocks support response was that it was caused by cheap 
DVD drives not fully supporting the standard. They suggest typing 
"frontend driverload=ide-scsi hdd=ide-scsi" to emulate a scsi interface. 
We tried it, but it didn't work.

We looked into creating a driver disk, but there isn't a driver image 
file like there was with earlier RedHat distributions, e.g. 
drvblock.img.  Same for the Fedora distribution we installed.  According 
to what we found on the Internet, RedHat no longer distributes a 
separate driver file.

So, what drives do work with BioBrew 3.0?  What brands have people used 
and found to work without a separate driver?

Cheers.
Jeff
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J.W. Bizzaro
Bioinformatics Organization, Inc. (Bioinformatics.Org)
E-mail: jeff at bioinformatics.org
Phone:  +1 508 890 8600
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