EFF CD and USB CD drive

Hi all,

I’m trying to copy the fonts from my ‘EFF Professional Typography 2’ CD into the !Fonts directory on my Raspberry Pi 2B. The CD worked fine in the past, and the CD drive works find both on my Mac and on this RISC OS machine. Separately, that is. The EFF CD opens using this drive and I can browse the directories. However, as soon as I start copying the contents of the RISC OS fonts directory either into the !Fonts directory or just onto the SD card on the Pi, the whole machine freezes and I get the error message “No hardware at this device ID”. Then it’s a power off jobby.

Any ideas?

My first thought is a power problem. Does the CD drive have its own PSU?

Another option might be to try copying onto a RAM disc rather than onto another storage medium, then copying from the RAM disc onto the other medium?

You could try sharing the CD from a machine where it works.

You could also make an ISO on another machine and use one of the image mounters to read it on the Pi.

Hardware broken – either the power supply, or the drive itself. How old is it?

I think you have CDBurn or CDVDBurn IIRC – you could try to extract the image with the SCSI driver instead of via CDFS, if the drive is OK then this will have better chances to work than with CDFS. Then mount the image with CDFaker.

and use one of the image mounters to read it on the Pi.

There is more than one???

Thank you for the help, gentlemen. It would appear that the CD drive was drawing too much power, or attempting to. I base that assumption on the fact that copying it onto a portable hard drive and using that worked flawlessly.

Unfortunately, the software step has failed, largely because I am a RISC OS returnee and the way things work has changed a bit since I was last a user.

So this is the EFF 2 CD from many moons ago, which means that the software not only is 26 bit, but is designed to take the front from the CD and merge them into the !Fonts on the machine. Unfortunately the software is not 32 bit compatible and the !Fonts directory is, I think, in a different place anyway.

I tried opening !Fonts from my portable HDD and copying the directories containing the actual fonts into !Fonts on the machine. I restarted and the fonts are not displaying. I then created a dummy !Fonts directory and used the merging facility, and that also did not work.

Any ideas on that? The basics are still coming back to me and I just cannot figure this out, although I wonder if it has to do with the fact that the stuff from the CD is all in capitals…

This is RISC OS 5.24 on a Pi, by the way.

It could be to do with the presence of a Messages1 file in the Fonts directory.

This was a list of fonts to load, to save having to enumerate them all each time. It speeded things up a bit, but stops new fonts being enumerated.

You could try deleting it – after taking a back-up somewhere safe!