[vox-tech] Heretical WinXP Q re: burning Knoppix CD's

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Richard Crawford (rscrawford@mossroot.com):

> I am apparently doing something wrong while trying to burn Knoppix CD's
> with my Windows XP laptop.

My apologies for my advice of a minute ago being inapplicable:  I was
reading this thread in reverse-date order, and so hadn't noticed that
you were asking about a laptop machine.

On a desktop machine, I would have strongly advised someone who had only
a CDR[W] drive and no regular read-only CD-ROM drive to retrofit one
of the latter immediately.  Why?  Because CD burner drives of necessity 
must have very heavy read/write arm assemblies, because they must carry
a burn laser in addition to the standard read head, and also generate
quite a bit of heat when operating in burn mode.  Therefore, such drives
have markedly low MTBF figures and should ideally be used only when
actually burning disks, not for everyday read-only use.

With a laptop that has a CDR or CDRW drive, there will almost certainly
not be a separate read-only CD drive, nor will it be practical to add
one.  So, in that sense, you're stuck.

That having been said, in your shoes, I'd still work out some way to do my
CD-burning from Linux rather than XP, e.g., shrink the NTFS partition
using a BootIt NG floppy and then install some distro to the space freed
up -- maybe Knoppix.  Burning CDs from Linux using your front-end
program of choice (e.g., k3b) is just more reliable and straight-forward
in my experience.

-- 
Cheers,        "A raccoon tangled with a 23,000 volt line, today.  The results
Rick Moen       blacked out 1400 homes and, of course, one raccoon."
rick@linuxmafia.com                                  -- Steel City News