Hi. On Sat 2003-01-25 at 20:29:10 -0700, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Is it possible to use dd to burn a CD without using cdrecord?
No. AFAIK, there are special (SCSI) commands involved when writing to
a CD-R. Even if your /dev/scd0 device driver (or whatever) would
create the needed commands, you will still lack things like the TOC,
etc.
> Does an iso need to be made first when using dd?
(Since using dd for burning itself makes no sense, I reinterpret the
question for cdrecord.) Well, that depends on what you want to use as
your source. Usually you want as end result on the CD to have a
iso9660 filesystem, if you are going to write a data CD. An "iso" is
nothing else than a file containing such a filesystem. You can easily
see that by mounting that file:
mount -oloop /path/to/somefile.iso /mnt/cdrom
cdrecord is only the tool to write such an prepared iso9660
filesystem-in-a-file, aka iso image, to the CD-R. In fact, cdrecord
happily burns any image file, even containing complete garbage, to the
CD-R. Reasonable images, which are *not* iso9660 are e.g. music CDs
and VCD. It is an unfortunate misnomer that it got common to call any
image for burning ISO, although technically only images with iso9660
filesystem make sense to be called this way.
In short: cdrecord expect some image file with reasonable content.
That can either be some existing image file (which you downloaded or
whatever), or you have to use a tool to create the image. For data CDs
that tool is makeisofs.
> What would the dd syntax be to go from the directory to the CD
I understand that you want to burn the content of some directory, so
that a copy of that directory is on CD-R afterwards? You have to use
mkisofs.
mkisofs -J -f -l -r /path/to/dir | cdrecord -pad- eject -v
Important: Only use the pipe(|) if your computer is fast or your have
a good burner which handles buffer-underruns gracefully.
There is no way doing this via dd except if the source is already an
iso9960 image, e.g. either a file or a CD in another drive. To copy a
CD in your CD-ROM drive you could use
dd if=/dev/cdrom bs=1M | cdrecord -pad -eject -v
Theoretically you could skip dd and redirect the input of cdrecord
(cdrecord -pad -eject -v </dev/cdrom), but cdrecord will exit with an
error when the end of /dev/cdrom is reached, not fixating the disk
(although it works to fixate the disk by aftwards with cdrecord -fix).
> or from the iso to the CD, whichever is the most appropriate?
If you already have an iso, simply use
cdrecord -pad -eject -v /path/to/somefile.iso
HTH,
Benjamin.
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