David Colomer said: > Fist of all my apologies for my lack of knowledge, but I am planning to > move my laptop from FC1 to FC2. I have a large amount of information > that I want to put into CDs before to move to FC2. for posterity, i'm going to paste in the cdrecording faq/howto i've been working on into this email. hopefully it'll help it get some distribution. there's still more work i want to do on it, but here you go: everything you've ever wanted to know about cd burning but were afraid to ask in this article, i'm going to breeze through many cd burning methods and ways to interact with disc images. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ creating a basic iso disc image from local files one of the things you have to ensure before creating an iso for burning is that you're not exceeding the 650/700MB limit of your media. let's say that what you want to burn is in the directory ./files and we want to check the size. # du -sh ./files now, we want to create our iso image, microsoft requires joliet (-J) information on the disc to properly render the long filenames, and rock ridge (-R) for long filenames under linux/unix. # mkisofs -RJ -o image.iso ./files extremely easy. no muss, no fuss. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ creating an iso disc image from a cd-rom let's assume that your cd drive with the cd-rom is located at /dev/cdrom and it is NOT mounted. now, we want to use dd to make an exact copy of the disc to an .iso file. please note that this does not work if the disc you're working with is a multi-session disc (audio and data). # dd if=/dev/cdrom of=image.iso again, extremely easy. no muss, no fuss. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ burning an iso image to a blank cd first, we need to find out what scsi id your cd writer is. linux uses a scsi emulation layer for all ide cd burners, usb key drives and firewire. # cdrecord -scanbus there will be a line with your cd burner pretty clearly labeled. the first bit (with 3 numbers seperated by commas) is what you're looking for. let's assume that it reported that your cd burner is located at 0,0,0 # cdrecord -v speed=40 dev=0,0,0 image.iso let's think about what we just read: -v is telling cdrecord to give us moderately verbose output, otherwise we'll be clueless about the progress of the burn until it is completed. speed=40 is telling the cd burner to burn at 40x, you can temper this to the speed of your cd burner. it's best not to get too nuts with this number on a machine with a limited amount of ram (256 megs or less) and a slower processor (around 400mhz). if you're one of the unfortunate, keep it down to 4-8x. the dev=0,0,0 is the scsi id we were returned with -scanbus and, of course, image.iso is the image we're trying to burn. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ checking the validity of the iso you just downloaded typically, an .iso file will come with a file containing md5sums of the image, this is typically called MD5SUMS or something similar. to get the md5sum of an image, use this command md5sum image.iso now, md5sum also has a -c option to check md5sums against a file, but many distributions sign the md5sum file with gpg/pgp, so you'll need to edit out that information first and just leave the lines containing the md5sum and the file. an md5sum line looks like this: a6330a9a07c592d15d291929d142e64f image.iso now, check the isos against the md5sum file # md5sum -c MD5SUMS md5sum will go through each file in the MD5SUMS file and check the signature of each, reporting an OK for each file that passes the test. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ blanking a cd-rw disc as before, use the following command to find out your cd-rw drive's scsi id # cdrecord -scanbus now we take scsi id that was returned (let's say 0,0,0) and we want to blank this disc quickly (who has time to putz around?) # cdrecord blank=fast dev=0,0,0 now, let's pretend that it didn't work. let's try a little harder. # cdrecord blank=all dev=0,0,0 ok, let's pretend it's being really ill tempered. let's try one last tactic before throwing away the disc and adding to the waste dumps. # cdrecord blank=all -force dev=0,0,0 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ copying from one disc to another first, we'll place our source disc in our /dev/cdrom drive now, we've used the following command # cdrecord -scanbus and found our scsi id (let's say it's 0,0,0). let's copy that disc with the following command. # cdrecord -v dev=0,0,0 -isosize /dev/cdrom let's take a look at we just did -v is for verbose output dev=0,0,0 tells cdrecord to use the device at scsi address 0,0,0 -isosize tells cdrecord use the limits of iso discs and specifications while burning this file (something that mkisofs already takes care of) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ copying an audio cd here we'll introduce a new command, cdparanoia. this program will rip the contents of your audio cd to your hard-drive in several formats and is one of the tools used in my own cd2ogg cd ripping and encoding script. first, create a temporary directory to store our .wav files # mkdir ./audio_temp # cd audio_temp now we'll run this command # cdparanoia -d /dev/cdrom -w 1- what'd we just type? -d /dev/cdrom tells cdparanoia to use /dev/cdrom, you can specify any drive with an audio cd in it. -w tells cdparanoia to create .wav audio files 1- instructs the program to rip from track 1 and up and now for the final step, burning the cd with cdrecord # cdrecord -v dev=0,0,0 speed=12 -audio -pad *.wav -v is ver verbose dev=0,0,0 specifies our cd device speed=12 specifies the recording speed we want -audio tells cdrecord that we're recording audio tracks not disc images -pad tells cdrecord to pad the audio files if necessary to conform to cd specs ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ mounting a cd image this is relatively easy, and as with everything else in this article, you must be root to perform the actions. keep in mind that this will be read only and you will not be able to make changes to the image. first, we have to make a mount point # mkdir ./mountpoint now, we mount the disc image on ./mountpoint # mount -o loop image.iso ./mountpoint -o loop tells mount to create a temporary /dev device called /dev/loopX where is is one higher than the number of the last created loop device. image.iso is our image file ./mountpoint is where we're mounting it +( duncan brown : duncanbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx )+ +( linux "just works" : www.linuxadvocate.net )+ -------------------------------------------------- Understatement of the century: "Hello everybody out there using minix - I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones" - Linus Torvalds, August 1991 --------------------------------------------------