Oscar Carrillo's Linux CD / DVD Writing HOWTO Guide

Created by Oscar Carrillo. Updated August 27, 2003 17:46

This isn't a fully Howto yet, but it's more specific on how to burn 2 data CDs at the same time. DVD Burning here

The main issues with burning multiple CDs simultaneously ARE:

• Make sure DMA is turned on. You will likely save yourself a lot of headache if you upgrade to kernel 2.4.21 or higher. Absolutely do this first. If you don't know how to compile the kernel, it's pretty easy and I would suggest figuring that out first. OK, maybe I'll put a HOWTO up on that too.


• I think I've tried all the Promise Ultra100 and Ultra 133 cards (except hardware RAID cards) and they work under kernel 2.4.21. CMD-640, and the later Via IDE chipsets work too. Many others certainly work but these are very common and now work beautifully.


• Make sure to compile IDE-SCSI emulation, SCSI, and SCSI general devices as modules.


• Figure out what your ide drives are recognized as. You can use "dmesg | more" to find this info, and add something like this in your bootloader script: hdc=ide-scsi


• Help yourself out by checking the drive: /sbin/hdparm /dev/hdX. Read the man pages for hdparm. Preferably you can set the drive to be optimized with this command: /sbin/hdparm -c1 -d1 -u1 /dev/hdX


• Help yourself out by checking available cd writers: cdrecord -scanbus Read the man pages for cdrecord. "cdrecord -scanbus" will tell you what device is your burning device. Place the device ID in your script (i.e. dev=0,0,0)


• Make the iso image before burning. Use mkisofs to create an image first and then use two separate processes to read from that file to burn each CD. My scripts below do this.


• Put each CD burner on a different IDE bus. No slave/master combinations. Maybe different controller cards also helps, but I haven't noticed a difference.


• Try everything out as root, and then if appropriate change so that normal users can burn CDs. Coming soon HOWTO


• Remember to make all scripts executable such as: chown 755 /usr/local/bin/dualBurn.sh

My scripts for burning dual CDs. You may need to change the location of things. It's straight-forward.
• Usage: dualBurn.sh < directory Name > dualBurn.sh
• This one keeps the complete file structure the directory resides in dualBurnDir.sh

DVD Burning

• DVD burning worked great with Sony DRU-510A. It burns +R(W) and -R(W). I've only tried DVD-R so far.
• Download cdrecord-prodvd for your platform from here. Make sure to also download cdrecord-wrapper.sh