SOLVED: Re: Problems with "burncd" - cannot mount result on unix or windows

[Paul Schmehl]

--On March 22, 2007 4:16:58 PM -0700 UCTC Sysadmin 
<support at transpacific.net> wrote:
>
> So THE FAQ and/or HOWTO SUCKS, is the problem. If that offends purists,
> try fixing your transmission
> under deadline with a japanese shop manual translated into english and
> no diagrams. Documentation makes
> all the difference, both to novices and to professionals. Someone who
> knows the how and what should
> write a contributed thing - whenever they have the time and desire to
> educate the unwashed masses.
>
man (8) burncd
" In the examples above, the files burned to data CD-Rs are assumed to be
     ISO9660 file systems.  mkisofs(8), available in the FreeBSD Ports 
Collec-
     tion, as part of the sysutils/cdrtools port, is commonly used to 
create
     ISO9660 file system images from a given directory tree."

Hmmmmm.....
man (8) mkisofs
"mkisofs  is  effectively  a  pre-mastering  program  to   generate   an
       ISO9660/JOLIET/HFS hybrid filesystem.

       mkisofs  is  capable  of  generating  the  System  Use Sharing 
Protocol
       records (SUSP) specified by the Rock Ridge Interchange Protocol. 
This
       is  used  to  further describe the files in the iso9660 filesystem 
to a
       unix host, and provides information such as longer filenames, 
uid/gid,
       posix permissions, symbolic links, block and character devices."

If you don't like man pages, there's always the handbook:
<http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/creating-cds.html>
"CDs have a number of features that differentiate them from conventional 
disks. Initially, they were not writable by the user. They are designed so 
that they can be read continuously without delays to move the head between 
tracks. They are also much easier to transport between systems than 
similarly sized media were at the time.

CDs do have tracks, but this refers to a section of data to be read 
continuously and not a physical property of the disk. To produce a CD on 
FreeBSD, you prepare the data files that are going to make up the tracks 
on the CD, then write the tracks to the CD.

The ISO 9660 file system was designed to deal with these differences. It 
unfortunately codifies file system limits that were common then. 
Fortunately, it provides an extension mechanism that allows properly 
written CDs to exceed those limits while still working with systems that 
do not support those extensions.

The sysutils/cdrtools port includes mkisofs(8), a program that you can use 
to produce a data file containing an ISO 9660 file system. It has options 
that support various extensions, and is described below.

Which tool to use to burn the CD depends on whether your CD burner is 
ATAPI or something else. ATAPI CD burners use the burncd program that is 
part of the base system. SCSI and USB CD burners should use cdrecord from 
the sysutils/cdrtools port. It is also possible to use cdrecord and other 
tools for SCSI drives on ATAPI hardware with the ATAPI/CAM module.

If you want CD burning software with a graphical user interface, you may 
wish to take a look at either X-CD-Roast or K3b. These tools are available 
as packages or from the sysutils/xcdroast and sysutils/k3b ports. 
X-CD-Roast and K3b require the ATAPI/CAM module with ATAPI hardware."

Unix systems *assume* you can read.  Perhaps that's a bad assumption, but 
that's the assumption they make.  Unfortunately, many people are impatient 
and get ahead of themselves, thinking that partial knowledge is all that's 
required.  Sometimes that works.  Sometimes it doesn't.

Paul Schmehl (pauls at utdallas.edu)
Senior Information Security Analyst
The University of Texas at Dallas
http://www.utdallas.edu/ir/security/