[GLLUG] CD-RW/CD-R for Linux

[Matt Graham]

On Tuesday 29 April 2003 16:23, after a long battle with technology, 
Seth Bembeneck wrote:

Seth, please don't top-post.  Message rearranged to comply with standard 
Usenet/E-mail conventions:

>Charles Ulrich wrote:
>> My only big problem now is that it's becoming really difficult to
>> find rewritable discs for it. It rewrites at 2x and simply balks at
>> most of the higher-rated ones that are in the stores now.

> Can't you specify the write speed?

"Low-speed" CD-RW media (1-4x) are different from "high-speed" (4-12x) 
CD-RW media.  For the high-speed media, the phase-change material has 
different physical properties and the older CD-RW drives don't have the 
right kind of laser for writing to them.  Specifying the write speed is 
therefore useless if you have a low-speed drive and high-speed media.  
CD-Rs do not have this problem.

> I went with the Cendyne cd-rw 

Purchase in haste, repent when it conks out 1 week after the warranty 
expires.  Oh well!

> I burned a cd, but I can't read it
> in windows, or even in linux... It was a multi-session cd if that
> makes a difference. I got a message saying that the current settings
> were not IS0?????? Complient. It looks like my X-CD Roast is in alpha
> stage. 

XCDRoast is the worst fucking pile of crap masquerading as a CD-Writing 
program it has ever been my displeasure to experience.  It sounds like 
the thing wasn't fixated.  The commands you should be using are like 
so:

mkisofs -r -J -V "VolumeLabel" /path/to/files | cdrecord -v -multi 
dev=X,Y,Z speed=W -

...that's for the first session, subsequent sessions get a little more 
complex:

SESSION=`cdrecord -msinfo`
mkisofs -r -J -C $SESSION -M /dev/scd0 /path/to/more/files | cdrecord -v 
-multi dev=X,Y,Z speed=W -

...leave the -multi option off for the final session.  Do *not* use -pad 
for data CDs.  Do *not* use -dao ; if you need to write in DAO mode, 
use cdrdao instead.  Do *not* use the -l option to mkisofs.

The first time you try burning a CD, you should do it from the command 
line with mkisofs and cdrecord.  If there are any problems, you will be 
informed immediately and you will get copious error info.  Frontends 
tend to strip out or dumb down the error info, making it impossible to 
diagnose/fix problems.  Try cdbakeoven instead of XCDRoast; its error 
logging is much better and it executes cdrecord itself in a sane way 
(no silly wrapper hell, just "chmod +s `which cdrecord` " as root and 
you're solid.)

For further info, http://groups.google.com/advanced_group_search , 
comp.os.linux.* , keyword "CD-RW", author "dances with crows".  HTH,

-- 
   Murphy's revenge: The more reliable you make a system, the longer it
   will take you to figure out what's wrong when it breaks.  
       --Sean Donelan, Mon, 26 Nov 2001
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see