cdrtools is a
set of utilities for recording cds in the Solaris operating
system. It is the only set of utilities supported by Physics
Computing
Services for this purpose. Use of these tools requires
installation
of the software, as well as SCSI drivers and possibly other supporting
software.
This document assumes you have already had these requirements
setup
by PCS.
Step 1: Create the
ISO image
Before the data
can be burned with cdrecord, the cdrtools recording utility,
it must be "mastered" using the mkisofs utility. This utility
simply
creates an iso filesystem image from the data required. Please
remember
that this file MUST be less than 650M (I usually shoot for 600 to be
safe),
and that therefor the data your feeding it must also total less than
this
amount. Also you must have that amount of space free in the
directory
you want to temporarily store the ISO. To see how much space the
files
in a directory are taking up, type
du -k
in that
directory. That will display the total size of all files,
in kilobytes.
Once you have a
directory with all the data you'd like to dump to a cdrom
in it, type the following:
You should get
back a bunch of lines giving you status updates with
percent complete and ETA, and then at the end some summary data about
how
much was written. Now you have an iso image to burn, time to
setup
the writer
Step 2: Burn the
image
Before you can
burn the image, you have to quickly disable volume management,
because it interferes with the recording process. There are two
ways
to do this. If you have root access to your system, become root,
then
type
/etc/init.d/volmgt stop
If you don't
have root access, you can use sudo, by typing
sudo /etc/init.d/volmgt/stop
Remember that
later on you'll want to re-enable that.
Now that volmgt
is turned off, you can insert the blank CDROM into the drive.
Then, execute the following command:
sudo cdrecord -dummy -v <name_of_your_iso_image>
which will do a
test-run to make sure all configurations are correct
and usable. If that works, then run
sudo cdrecord -v <name_of_your_iso_image>
to actually burn
the cdrom. Notice I didn't say to become root,
even if you have the ability to do so? That's because running ANY
utility
as root if you don't need to is a bad idea. Use sudo; it's a good
thing!
Once finished,
run the above mentioned /etc/init.d/volmgt command (with or
without the sudo, however you did it before) only this time give it the
"start"
argument instead of "stop". After a minute, your system should
automount
your newly created cd! If it doesn't, hit the manual eject on the
drive,
then reload the cd and it should work.
Don't forget to
delete the ISO image you created, or you'll be wasting hard
drive space.
Other CDRtools
There are a
number of other utilities included in the cdrtools package, but
cdrecord and mkisofs are the only ones covered here because they're the
ones
our users are most likely going to need. The other utilities
include
cdda2wav, devdump, isoinfo,mkhybrid,readcd,isodump,isovfy, and
scgcheck.
Check the man pages for these utilities or the cdrtools homepage
at
http://www.fokus.gmd.de/research/cc/glone/employees/joerg.schilling/private/cdrecord.html.