DVD cloning tool

[Andrew Gould]

On Fri, Dec 5, 2008 at 9:11 AM, Polytropon <freebsd at edvax.de> wrote:

> Hi!
>
> I'd like to ask which program is the proper tool to copy
> a DVD(+|-)R 1:1 to another media of the same kind? It
> would be great if the program would have a good error
> tolerance for slightly defective media (which is a usual
> problem with cheap DVDs).
>
> I've always used cdrdao read-cd and afterwards cdrdao write
> for CD-R, but I cannot use this tool for DVDs, right?
>
> So far I've used growisofs to record pre-mastered ISO
> file systems, but I don't want to make it that complicated
> (mound source DVD, mkisofs, growisofs / burn this ISO
> to destination DVD) if it can be avoided. It's not
> neccessary to perform this operation from one drive
> to the other, it's okay to have a temporary file
> (first read, then burn).
>
> --
> Polytropon
> >From Magdeburg, Germany
> Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
> Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
>


If your CD or DVD is loaded (not mounted) at /dev/cd0, the following command
will create an iso image in the current directory:

     dd if=/dev/cd0 of=filename.iso bs=2048

If you want an easy process, you can put this in a script, followed by a
growisofs command to burn the file to another DVD device, allowing the
script to overwrite the previous DVD iso file.  Or you could write a script
where you supply a name for the iso image file to maintain backup images.

I hope this helps.

Andrew