<h1>Useful hints for dvdisaster</h1>

<h2>Device access</h2>

<p>dvdisaster tries to read <code>/dev/pass*</code> to list available optical drives,
so it will not detect any available drives if the user running
dvdisaster does not have permissions to read <code>/dev/pass*</code>.</p>

<p>The solution is to create the file <code>/etc/devfs.rules</code>, containing
something like the following.</p>

<pre><code>    [localrules=10]
    add path 'pass*' mode 0775 group mygroup
</code></pre>

<p>You also need to add this line to <code>/etc/rc.conf</code>:</p>

<pre><code>    devfs_system_ruleset="localrules"
</code></pre>

<p>You can use anything you like for <code>localrules</code>, and the number does not have to be <code>10</code>.
See <code>devfs.rules(5)</code> for more details.</p>

<p>If <code>/etc/devfs.rules</code> already exists, add the line starting <code>add</code> to the section for the ruleset
mentioned in <code>/etc/rc.conf</code>.</p>

<p>For this to take effect, either reboot, or issue the command:</p>

<pre><code>    # service devfs restart
</code></pre>

<p>as root.</p>

<h2>Missing optical drives</h2>

<p>The most common problem encountered is that dvdisaster does not detect
optical drives on older versions of FreeBSD.</p>

<p>FreeBSD 9.x does not pre-install a uniform CD-ROM driver for SCSI and
ATAPI drives, thus it cannot use any ATAPI drives in an out-of-the-box
FreeBSD 9.x installation. Normally, this can be fixed by loading a
kernel module called <code>atapicam</code>.</p>

<h3>Loading the <code>atapicam</code> kernel module by hand</h3>

<p>To manually load the required kernel module, issue the command:</p>

<pre><code>    # kldload atapicam
</code></pre>

<p>To see if any optical drives are  available:</p>

<pre><code>    # camcontrol devlist
    &lt;NAME OF YOUR DRIVE&gt;           at scbus1 target 0 lun 0 (pass0,cd0)
</code></pre>

<h3>Loading the <code>atapicam</code> kernel module permanently</h3>

<p>If the above step works, the module can be loaded automatically at boot time by adding
the line:</p>

<pre><code>    atapicam_load="YES"
</code></pre>

<p>to the file <code>/boot/loader.conf</code>.</p>

<h3>Building the <code>atapicam</code> module</h3>

<p>If the atapicam kernel module is not available (check the contents
of /boot/kernel) you will need to recompile the kernel with the following
additional device line in the kernel configuration:</p>

<pre><code>    device atapicam
</code></pre>

<p>This will actually build the module into the kernel. To build it separately,
see <code>make.conf(5)</code>.</p>

<p>The devices <code>ata</code>, <code>scbus</code>, <code>cd</code>, and <code>pass</code> are also required, but are included by
default in FreeBSD 6.0 and later.</p>