Coasterless CD Burning

[littleman]

I just bout myself a $19 CD RW, and I am having fun with it as I'm typing this.

I came across this think ( [troubleshooters.com...] ), it has some good advice on burning ISOs -- might be useful for some.

First thing I'm going to try is to burn a copy of the latest Knoppix so that I could use it grab a couple of would be converts. :)

[martin]

I haven't found any problems using dd, I've copied a CD only once though.

PS. We call them clocks not coasters here.

[mack]

coaster...I always think of that as something you sit your coffee cup on :)

[dingman]

coaster...I always think of that as something you sit your coffee cup on

It is. And AOL is on a quest to make sure nobody alive has to set their mug directly on the table. ;)

[dhdweb]

Good one dingman :)

<added>
Ever put one in the microwave? You get a cool little show!

! WARNING !
Only nuke it for 1 or 2 seconds!

[mack]

I went one better... I microwaved it, scanned it and emailed it back to them :)

It quite amazing the texture you see in a zapped cd.

[Hawkgirl]

How timely!
I just bought a $30 CDRW (I feel ripped off, now, seeing that yours was $19!).

Also bought a pack of 50 CD-R's for $7 (after a rebate).

I'm going to install the CDRW drive tonight and (hopefully) start cleaning off my hard drive. It's choking to death from all of the MP3s and photo images.

I'm doubly excited because my new DVD player also plays MP3s on CD ... another reason to do some copying.

[dhdweb]

Way to go mack,

I wonder if they will take you off the mailing list now?

[dingman]

Back on-topic, another tip that might help people make CDs that are good for more than just setting their mugs on:

If using an older machine, make sure that you never try to burn with the source and destination drives on the same IDE controller. This applies whether you are burning from an image on a hard drive or directly copying from another CD drive, and is only a problem on older machines. I'm not sure quite where the cut-off is, but I know that when I got my first burner, this was a common reccomendation, and when I tested it on my own machine, a p166mmx, the warnings were borne out.

I seem to recall that this isn't a problem on my Athlon 750, but I don't know how I would know, since it has SCSI hard drives and the DVD and CD-RW drives are each alone on their own controllers, so there is no way to burn a disk from a source on the same controller.

<added> missed a word. The sentence makes sense now.</added>

[dhdweb]

Sorry about jumping off track! :)

Another tip for older machines is to Not multi-task while burning a CD.
This will keep the needed resources for the task available.

Happy burning!

[dingman]

You appologize for jumpting the track? I was directing the barb at myself ;)

Useful regardless of your machine's age: after you make an image to burn, you can test the image before burning it to a disk by mounting it over a loopback device, eg,

$ mount -t iso9660 -o loop=/dev/loop1 /path/to/image.iso /mnt/point

Then use whatever tools are apropriate to verify that the directory structure and files are as you intended them.

Wandering slightly away from the topic again, the tip about using cat rather than dd is a good one. dd gets over-used as a way to make direct coppies of stuff, and cat does it quite well, only without as many options to get confused by :). I've even used cat to sucessfully copy all several partitions from one hard drive to another in one command, with diferent sized hard drives! (eg, 'cat /dev/hda > /dev/hdb', then a couple hours later use fstab to add a partition in the empty space at the end of hdb, swap some jumpers around, and boot off of the former hdb)

[Hawkgirl]

I'm impressed. Just put the new CDRW drive into the box and Windows XP detected and installed it immediately.

I'm shocked. I think I need to take back one or two of the things I said about Bill Gates and his Winpire. :)

I didn't take the new drive for a spin yet, but will be doing so this evening.

Here's a question:

Does anyone really use the RW capability? I bought CD-Rs, because they're cheap enough that I'm not sure why I'd want to rewrite over them.

[dingman]

I use RWs for stuff I want on CD now, but know I'm not going to give a darn about in a little while. It's a habbit I got into back when RWs cost $5 a piece and Rs cost $1.5, so it didn't take to many re-uses to pay for itself. Any more, I don't do it as often simply because I can't buy RW disks slow enough to work in my old drive, so I'm stuck with the original 5 that I bought.

[Hawkgirl]

(I'm new to CDs, can you tell?) Do they ever corrupt or degrade?

[dhdweb]

They will degrade if you put them in the microwave!

Sorry, I just had to say that. :)

For the most part they will not degrade if treated with a little respect.