[PLUG] cdrecord howto

Fedor G. Pikus fedorp at wv.mentorg.com
Sun Sep 1 17:02:09 UTC 2002


First of all, if you just want to copy CDs, you can get xcdroast from
http://www.xcdroast.org/, click "Copy CD" and let it do the work for you.

On Sun, 1 Sep 2002, Rick Konold wrote:
> > Don't mount the CD.  Just dump the image off the disk
> > $ dd if=/dev/cdrom of=/path/to/disk_image bs=2048
>
> I didn't think I was mounting the cd with cp -r, I thought it just copied the
No, but you need to mount the CD before cp will work. Otherwise you were
not copying the CD. BTW, you should have used cp -a, not cp -r, if you wanted
to create full copy of the CD file by file (it's not used for copying CDs,
it's for creating the directory structure and all files from CD on hard disk).

> cd already be correct (2048)? [just wondering if it is necessary to tell dd
> what bs, or if it would just copy as is without that specification]
Not really necessary, it'll work without bs too.

> > Then you can burn the image with cdrecord:
> > $ cdrecord -v speed=8 dev=0,0,0 -data /path/to/disk_image
>
> Hmmm more of that conflicting advise stuff.  I was told I did not need to use
> the -data, and the man page seemed to confirm that when I read that it was
You can leave off -data.

> Yep, dev=1,0,0  , and the speed is another question.  I see posts
I always burn at 12x and never made a bad CD. At such speeds you need to
either fully dedicate your machine to burning (don't do anything else
while cdrecord runs, don't touch it at all, and make sure you don't have
any powersave modes kicking in), or you need a CD-writer with burnproof,
then just add -burnproof to cdrecord options, Then you can suspend cdrecord
with Ctrl-Z and it'll continue just fine when you resume.

> > Autorun files are for Windows.  The boot block should be part of the disk
> > image, no?
>
> boot.cat (unknown file type, per nautilus) is there, perhaps that is it.

Neither of these has anything to do with being bootable. Autorun is not
about booting from it, it's what runs when you stick the CD into already
running windows. There are cd-watching daemons for Linux (Gnome and KDE run
them by default), they could execute something on CD if there was a
convention how to name it, but there isn't so they don't. What you need
to boot is a boot sector with bootloader in it, and then the kernel in the
location expected by the loader. Since you will just copy CDs sector by sector
with dd, you don't have to worry about this.
-- 
                                  Fedor G. Pikus
Mentor Graphics Corporation         | Phone: (503) 685-4857
8405 SW Boeckman Road               | FAX:   (503) 685-1239
Wilsonville, Oregon 97070           | http://www.pikus.net/~pikus/




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