[rescue] More IRIX questions: why won't it boot from my 6.5.24 CDs?

[Sheldon T. Hall]

Quoth Kevin ...
> 
> I've had many Plextor drives work and some old "double speed" 
> Apple drives (Matsushita) work just fine on all my SGIs.

Plextor SCSI CD drives, both readers and burners, seem to work very well
with SGIs.

> I've heard of people having
> success with various Toshiba drives as well.

The OEM drives that came on mid-nineties SGIs are Toshibas ... 2x caddy
drives, though.  

> With the way things have gone with IRIX and SGI, it might be 
> advantageous
> for us to spend some time trying to figure out how to 
> successfully copy the
> EFS CDs into an image that could be copied using any platform....

I've used this script to make ISOs of SGI installation CDs under IRIX.
However, I'd expect that the ISO images it creates would work OK if burned
on a PC under Windows, or about anything else.

#!/bin/sh
#
# Determines the name of the inserted CD and clones it to
# an ISO with that name, in the current directory.
#
[ -r /CDROM/.IM ] || { echo "Not an identifiable IRIX CD"; exit 0; }

T=`grep 'title =' /CDROM/.IM | sed 's/.*= //g' | tr '/ :' '-__' | tr -d '"'`
T="${T}.iso"
/usr/local/bin/clone_data_CD_to_ISO $T

# END

... which calls this one ...

#! /bin/sh
#
# Uses dd to create an ISO image of a CD.

[ "$1" ] || { echo "USEAGE: $0 outputfile" ; echo "/CDROM is input" ; exit 1
; }

cd=`mount | grep 'CDROM ' | cut -d ' ' -f 1 | sed 's/s7$/vol/'`

echo "Input is $cd"
echo "Output is $1"

if dd if=$cd of=$1 bs=512; then
        chmod 744 $1
        ls -la $1
        sum $1
        sum $cd 
        exitcode=0
else
        exitcode=$?
fi

eject /CDROM

exit $exitcode

# END

... I use the script below to burn CD from ISOs, like those created above
...

#! /bin/sh
#
# Burn a CD from an ISO image.

[ "$1" ] || { echo "USEAGE: $0 file.iso write_dev" ; exit 1 ; }

w=$2
write_dev=${w:="1,5,0"}

[ -r $1 ] && cdrecord -v dev=$write_dev $1 || { echo "File not found: $1" ;
exit 1 ; }

eject `echo $write_dev | sed 's/,/ /g'`

# END

-Shel