CD-RW

[ZIYAD A. M. AL-BATLY]

On Mon, 2005-07-04 at 15:51 -0400, Douglas Alves wrote:
> Hi fellows
> 
> What options are there for handling ReWritable CDs?
> 
> Must we "create a new CD" every time we wish to save a file on them?
No.  If you have a CD-RW media (which you do otherwise what's your
question?) and your CD-Writer drive supports it, you could "format" it
with the UDF file system.  You need to install the package "udftools"
and see the manual page for the utilities installed with that package
(the most important ones are: "mkudffs" for formating; and "pktsetup" to
setup the device node and such).

Please note that the UDF file-system (originally intended for DVD media)
takes a lot of disk space (on a 700MiB CD-RW media it takes about
120MiB, leaving about 580MiB free space).  After doing that, a CD-RW
media formated with UDF will act as a floppy disk or a removable hard
disk.

Another note:  You might want to add the option "rw,noatime" to the
options in the line that is responsible for you CD-ROM in "/etc/fstab"
to extended the lifetime of the CD-RW media like this (this is on my
system):

/dev/cdrw /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 rw,noatime,users,noauto,iocharset=utf8 0 0

> 
> What do the Graveman Format options mean?
>  - CD-Rom Mode 1
>  - CD-Rom Mode 2
>  - CD-Rom XA Mode 1
>  - CD-Rom XA Mode 2
> 
> 
I don't know what "Graveman" is!

As far as I know (and I'm always wrong by the way!) and in a nutshell:
      * Mode 2 (whether XA or not) turns *off* the automatic generation
        of ECC (Error Correction Code - 276 bytes) and EDC (Error
        Detection Code - 4 bytes) when writing.
      * XA CD-ROM (whether Mode 1 or Mode 2) means that it contain a mix
        of:  Data (regular files), Text (information about this CD like
        the album name and the copyright notice), Audio, Video, and/or
        Photo tracks.

Here's some links about the subject:
      * http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci211759,00.html
      * http://www.deluxemedia.com/support/cdtech/cdrom/cdrom_formats.xml

Ziyad.