On 26 Apr 2004, at 11:58am, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > I seem to remember from a long time ago, that just dd'ing a CD (or hard > drive for that matter) didn't produce workable results. Looks like things > have gotten better since then.
It's one of those "it depends" things. With CDs, between all the different standards, and all the variations and violations different vendors have added, not all CDs will play nice with a simple "dd" command. The El Torito spec, though, is, as I understand it, a fairly simple extension to ISO-9660. This is evident in that fact that bootable ISO images downloaded from the 'net don't require any special commands to "cdrecord" when burning. With hard disks, again, "it depends". Some things care about things like C/H/S geometry and geometry translation, other things don't. Exactly which things care, and how, is arcane to the extreme. One of the things I still haven't figured out but am rather curious about is that if I download a Red Hat CD image, use "cdrecord" to burn it, and then boot and run a "mediacheck", it will pass just fine. But if I do diff -q /dev/cdrom /path/to/cdimage.iso then I get a mismatch (/dev/cdrom ends prematurely). I don't get how it can pass Red Hat's media check but not diff properly. Here there be dragons. -- Ben Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | The opinions expressed in this message are those of the author and do | | not represent the views or policy of any other person or organization. | | All information is provided without warranty of any kind. | _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss