[PLUG] K3B vs Command Line vs Anything Else

Elliott Mitchell ehem at m5p.com
Sun Oct 15 03:30:08 UTC 2006


> From: Paul Mullen <pm at nellump.net>
> On Fri, Oct 13, 2006 at 02:38:55PM -0700, Michael M. wrote:
> > The beginning of the end of my trust in proprietary software
> > solutions was when I discovered I'd been hoodwinked by
> > Adaptec/Roxio's fantabulous marketing claims for packet-writing to
> > CD/RW.  "Use your CD-ROM drive just like a floppy drive and get 500X
> > the storage capacity!"  Yeah ... how about, "Lose 500X the amount of
> > data you can with a floppy!"
> 
> Another sucker^H^H^H^H^H^Hproud owner of several useless DirectCD
> discs, eh? I feel your pain. And now that I think about it, I'm pretty
> sure I just gave away the last computer I had that could read those
> coasters. I hope there was nothing valuable on them. :-(

I certainly wouldn't use RW media and UDF for long term archival storage,
but for short term they appear to work well. UDF has sparing tables to
compensate for sectors that die so you shouldn't lose files. UDF also has
the advantage of being very widely supportted so various OSes can read
the filesystems (useful for a removable hard disk).


> From: Carlos Konstanski <ckonstanski at pippiandcarlos.com>
> Doesn't the linux kernel support packet writing?  I've never used it
> (for reasons like those mentioned already), but I see the option in the
> kernel config.  Perhaps someone out there can actually explain how to
> make use of it.

Yes. If you're lucky and have a drive with good firmware, you won't even
need that option (the +RW drives are supposed to simulate 2K granularity
rewritable sectors, but not all drives actually do). For the majority,
enable that option.

For CD-RWs and DVD-RWs:
cdrwtool -d /dev/cdrw -q (burns the entire media so several minutes)

For DVD+RW:
dvd+rw-format (takes 30 seconds, the + group did do neat things with RW)


modprobe pktcdvd (assuming it is a module)
pktsetup foo /dev/dvdrw (early 2.6 foo needs to be a number, later foo is
an arbitrary string)
mount -t udf /dev/pktcdvd/foo /mnt/mnt -o noatime
(have fun)
umount /mnt/mnt
pktsetup -d foo (no "/dev/pktcdvd/" on the begining!)


For good drives the use of `pktsetup` isn't even needed, directly mount
the device. I'm unsure whether the last step is supposed to be required,
but the drive tends to get locked if you don't do it.


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