17. CD-ROM drives

17.1. Supported

Common CD-ROM drives

• SCSI CD-ROM drives (From the CD-ROM HOWTO) Any SCSI CD-ROM drive with a block size of 512 or 2048 bytes should work under Linux; this includes the vast majority of CD-ROM drives on the market.

• EIDE (ATAPI) CD-ROM drives (IDECD) Almost all double, quad and six speed drives are supported, including

  • Mitsumi FX400

  • Nec-260

  • Sony 55E

Proprietary CD-ROM drives

• Aztech CDA268-01A, Orchid CDS-3110, Okano/Wearnes CDD-110, Conrad TXC, CyCDROM CR520ie/CR540ie/CR940ie (AZTCD)

• Creative Labs CD-200(F) (SBPCD)

• Funai E2550UA/MK4015 (SBPCD)

• GoldStar R420 (GSCD)

• IBM External ISA (SBPCD)

• Kotobuki (SBPCD)

• Lasermate CR328A (OPTCD)

• LMS Philips CM 206 (CM206)

• Longshine LCS-7260 (SBPCD)

• Matsushita/Panasonic CR-521/522/523/562/563 (SBPCD)

• MicroSolutions Backpack parallel portdrive (BPCD)

• Mitsumi CR DC LU05S (MCD/MCDX)

• Mitsumi FX001D/F (MCD/MCDX)

• Optics Storage Dolphin 8000AT (OPTCD)

• Sanyo CDR-H94A (SJCD)

• Sony CDU31A/CDU33A (CDU31A)

• Sony CDU-510/CDU-515 (SOMYCD535)

• Sony CDU-535/CDU-531 (SONYCD535)

• Teac CD-55A SuperQuad (SBPCD)

17.2. Alpha, Beta drivers

• LMS/Philips CM 205/225/202 here

• NEC CDR-35D (old) here

• Sony SCSI multisession CD-XA here

• Parallel Port Driver here

17.3. Notes

All CD-ROM drives should work similarly for reading data. There are various compatibility problems with audio CD playing utilities. (Especially with newer low-end NEC drives.) Some alpha drivers may not have audio support yet.

Early (single speed) NEC CD-ROM drives may have trouble with currently available SCSI controllers.

PhotoCD (XA) is supported. The hpcdtoppm program by Hadmut Danisch converts PhotoCD files to the portable pixmap format. The program can be obtained from here or as part of the PBM utilities.

Also, reading video CD is supported in kernel series 2.1.3x and later. A patch is available for kernel 2.0.30.

Finally, most IDE CD-ROM Changers are supported.