Burning data on CD

The lab currently (Aug '98) has two CD-ROM burners; one attached to moviola, and one going to Italy. These instructions should work for either CD burner. Thanks to Craig Kolb for setting everything up, I just put his info on this web page.
-Lucas

Overview

Burning CD-ROMs is a 2-step process. First, you create an image file, which contains everything that you want to put on the CD (including the file system). Then you actually burn the image onto the CD.

Creating the CD image

First, create an image to burn using "mkisofs". cd to someplace with a decent amount of disk space (say moviola:/nle) and run:

mkisofs -r -L -o cdrom.img directoryname

Examples:

mkisofs -r -L -o cdrom.img /n/snell/home/lucasp
mkisofs -r -L -o cdrom.img -x /n/snell/home/lucasp/dumpster \ /n/snell/home/lucasp

It should spew for a while and eventually you'll have the image file for burning. (See "man mkisofs" for details on what the above options do, or for how to exclude directories from the image via the -x option, etc.)

Notes:

This will create a file system that shows the full filenames on UNIX machines, but truncates to 8.3 filenames on Windows 95/NT machines. The 8.3 names often become really obscure, using numbers to differentiate files with similar beginnings (e.g. _DESKTOP-.005 for .desktop-glim).
Be careful when you have dot-files several levels deep. I noticed once that top-level dot files (e.g. .emacs) were included in the CDROM image, but dot files nested inside other directories were skipped by mkisofs.

Burning the CD image onto CDROM

Next, burn the sucker. Stick a CDROM in the drive, and run:

cdrecord -v speed=4 dev=2,1,0 cdrom.img (on moviola) This pretty much does what it says: burn cdrom.img at 4x using the burner on SCSI bus 2, device 5, unit 0, and be verbose about it.

Notes:

A CD can only be burned once. You can't "add more" later. If a burn fails halfway through, you have to start over with a brand new blank CDROM.
If the CD burner won't open when you hit the eject button, turn off the power switch on the back of the CD burner for a second. When you turn it back on, it should respond to the eject button.
Good quality CDs seem to make a difference. I've had a burn fail (e.g. report an error and exit) on average about every 300MB with cheap Memorex CDs, but have never had a failure with the Kodak CDs. Your mileage may vary.

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Lucas Pereira

lucasp@graphics.stanford.edu