5 replies to this topic

[mdec]

Hello,

 

I've installed Alcohol 120% in a VM and I need to actually be able to use my burner. Has anyone tried to set up a Linux iSCSI target (server) that lends out the burner to a Windows iSCSI initiator (client)? Did it work with Alcohol 120%? I'm in the middle of recompiling my kernel to give it PSCSI support necessary to lend physical devices over iSCSI.

 

Btw no, I can't install Windows on the bare metal.

[Charalambos]

Can't you include the burner when you make the VM? With Virtual Box at least you can (if I remember correctly).

[mdec]

libvirt can only lend the block device file of an inserted disc, which means:
- I'm not going to be able to use Alcohol 120% at all if I want to copy a disc that has audio tracks, because Linux block devices for optical drives don't expose these kinds of things, only SCSI commands do that

- I'm going to be in a pickle if I want to do some things that are independent of the memory image of a particular disc, and instead rely a bit more on hardware, like SecuROM, let's say I want to create a mdf image of a SecuROM protected disc that can be mounted with DPM emulation to bypass SecuROM without a ###### - for that I will need hardware access

[mdec]

Progress has been made, but we're not there yet.

 

In case my answer has not gone through:
>Can't you include the burner when you make the VM? With Virtual Box at least you can (if I remember correctly).

No, I cannot. Windows does not expose the actual device to the VM, but instead the image that's mounted to the drive letter. On Linux you can get just as far by exposing the cdrom block device to the VM, however, that block device only contains the image that's on the disc. So, regardless of what system your hypervisor is, you get the same results. Your VM will only gain access to the bland iso9660/udf image. You have no way of issuing SCSI commands to read subchannel data, read in raw/sub96p or whatever. This is not going to be the authentic experience, you're just as good mounting iso files.

 

Continuing. I have set up an iSCSI target on Linux and then an iSCSI initiator on Windows, which happens to be the machine I have registered for my Alcohol 120% license. I asked somewhere else about getting access to customer forum, but the person in charge of receiving PMs about it seems to be away.

 

I have managed to successfully read subchannel data and skip sectors, however I am not able to conduct a DPM read. For what it's worth, using Alcohol 120% on CDROMs obtained through iSCSI is blazing fast!

[Charalambos]

 

 

I have managed to successfully read subchannel data and skip sectors, however I am not able to conduct a DPM read.

Well, I can't help you on that and I don't know if anyone can.

[joejoe]

@mdec I think I didn't really understand what the problem is. You say linux does not expose audio tracks on game CDs at all. But that is not true. You can run cd-info for example and it will list all the tracks.

 

I am personally using Virtual Box and you have many options. You can pass the host drive using IDE or SATA and there is a passthrough option. So you have 4 ways to pass a CD drive to the guest OS.

 

Everything is working fine using Virtual Box. I tried the qemu/libvirt/virt-manager stuff and at least in the GUI there are almost no options compared to Virtual Box.