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hello!
i would like to know how to detect the type of an ATA or ATAPI Drive, for example, ATAPI Drive is a CD-ROM, CD-RW, DVD-ROM, DVD-RW, Blue-Ray Device, Zip Drive, or Tape Drive.
anyone has an idea about that?
thanks in advance and regards

I'm not ATA or PCI expert, but I think that device capability can be pulled out from PCI configuration space. Not sure if ATA provides such a capability.

You'll want to find yourself a copy of the ATA/ATAPI specs, and familiarize yourself with the IDENTIFY DEVICE and IDENTIFY PACKET DEVICE commands. Then of course to actually do much of anything else with ATAPI devices, you'll need the SCSI docs as well.

And that doesn't even address SATA/SATAPI/SAS devices. There's specs for those, too.

GOOGLE will be your friend.