Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
vendors, including Ricoh's JustLink, Waste-Proof and Safeburn from Yamaha, SMART-
Burn from Lite-On, and Superlink from Mediatek, among others. For a number of years,
all recordable/rewritable drives have included some type of buffer underrun protection.
Buffer underrun protection technology involves having a special chipset in the drive that
monitors the drive buffer. When it anticipates that a buffer underrun might occur (the buf-
fer is running low on data), it temporarily suspends the recording until more data fills the
buffer. When the buffer is sufficiently restocked, the drive then locates exactly where the
recording left off earlier and restarts recording again immediately after that position.
According to the Orange Book specification, gaps between data in a recording must not
be more than 100 milliseconds in length. The buffer underrun technology can restart the
recording with a gap of 40-45 milliseconds or less from where it left off, which is well
within the specification. These small gaps are easily compensated for by the error correc-
tion built into the recording, so no data is lost.
If both your drive and recording software supports buffer underrun protection, you can
multitask—do other things while burning discs—without fear of producing a bad record-
ing.
Booting from a Floppy Disk with Optical Drive Support
Although modern OSs are distributed on bootable discs, you might need to boot from a
floppy to start a restore process from a disk imaging utility or to install an older OS, such
asWindows9xorMe.EvenifyouareinstallingWindows9xorMeinavirtualizedenvir-
onment such as those created with Microsoft Virtual PC or VMware, you need to boot the
virtual machine with a floppy disc containing optical disc support before you can install
the OS into the VM.
Foranopticaldrivetofunctioninafloppybootenvironment,severaldriversmightbene-
cessary:
•
A host adapter driver
—A set of universal ATAPI and SCSI host adapter drivers are
included on Windows 98/Me startup disks.
•
MSCDEX
—Microsoft CD Extensions, which is included with DOS 6.0 and later, in-
cluding the Windows 98/Me startup disks.
If you need to start a PC from a bootable floppy, the floppy must contain not only a boot-
able OS, but also the previously mentioned drivers; otherwise, the CD-ROM will be inac-
cessible.
You can find universal ATAPI and SCSI drivers on the Windows 98 and newer startup
disks. Rather than create custom CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files, the best ad-
vice I can give is to merely boot from a Windows 98 or Me startup floppy because each
