Acronym for Compact Disc - Read Only Memory

(See DiskVsDisc)

Standard discs hold 650MB or there abouts. The normal filesystem used on a data CDROM is ISO-9660, although most discs also use MicrosoftCorporation's Joliet extensions that allow some things like long filenames (although some characters that are valid on unix filesystems are not allowed). Another such extension is called Rock Ridge.

On a Linux OperatingSystem, your IDE drives (both CDROM or HardDisk) will be available as raw devices in /dev/hda (for primary master), /dev/hdb (for primary slave), /dev/hdc (secondary master), or /dev/hdd (secondary slave). SCSI drives will be /dev/scd<i> where <i> is a number starting from 0.

You only need to worry about raw access for reading audio disks or writing CDs. For accessing data, the disc will be mounted.

Freebsd (5 and later) has raw device files available for IDE CDROMs as /dev/acd0, /dev/acd1, etc.

Related: CDWritingNotes, HowToCDWritingHOWTO?, HowToCDROMHOWTO? and HowToMP3CDBurning?