I've got my new DVD writer installed now. The hardest part was turning my flat upside-down to find the flat-headed screwdriver, but it's sorted now.
Amazingly, the first disk I burnt came out right. It wasn't particularly
obvious how to get that far. I was told that growisofs was a good
way of burning data DVDs. It didn't work, just sat there spinning the CPU
forever, but just in case I need it again the command I used was this:
sudo growisofs -v -Z /dev/dvd -R -J files...
With growisofs you have to make a crufty little wrapper script
to make it work with sudo, like this:
#!/bin/bash unset SUDO_COMMAND export MKISOFS=/usr/bin/mkisofs exec /usr/bin/growisofs "$@"
But that didn't get me anywhere, so I had to use Jörg Schilling's ProDVD thing. Annoyingly, this is non-free software, but even worse is the way Schilling fucks you around with his daft licensing system. Here's what you have to do:
- Figure out which executable file to download from the FTP site.
- Read Schilling's tedious and incomprehensible README file to work out how to get a license and put it in the right environment variable.
- Find that you can ignore all that crap and just download his shell script, which does it for you, mostly. Update: you'll have to periodically download a new version of the script when the license key expires. The program will tell you this has happened with the helpful message “Alarm clock” during the second compulsory pause.
Once you've got that far, you can find out what device numbers your DVD writer has with this command:
sudo sh cdrecord-wrapper.sh dev=ATAPI --scanbus
You need to find the three comma-separated numbers, which will go
after the ATAPI bit when writing the disk. You'll also want
to make the ISO image. This is where growisofs would be handy,
because with that you wouldn't have to write a 4Gb file to hard drive,
only to read it back again. Anyway, just use mkisofs as you
would for a CD:
mkisofs -o foo.iso -v -r -J files...
I've seen -R shown in examples, but -r looks more
sensible to me. I could be wrong.
Finally, to actually write the big glob of data to a DVD (replacing
0,0,0 with whatever numbers --scanbus told you):
sudo sh cdrecord-wrapper.sh -v dev=ATAPI:0,0,0 foo.iso