Instructions for using the PIRL CD/DVD Recorder

Moses Milazzo and Joe Plassmann, PIRL/LPL

Overview

The PIRL CD/DVD recorder is a device that allows users to create CDROM and DVD disks from datasets maintained on the PIRL system. This device may be accessed from any system on the PIRL network.

A bit of somewhat usefull information: The recorder hardware has the capability to "premaster" a dataset, so that many identical copies may be produced. The recorder harwdare is a Linux box running cdrecord. The recorder is in the PIRL user room beside Deimos. The program may be run from any machine on the PIRL net. CD/DVD blanks may be obtained singly or in bulk, given a valid account number. Contact Linda Hickcox for information.

Description of Use

Before you start cdr, you must collect your data into a single directory. Once you've done that, you are ready to burn a CD/DVD with your data.

It's easy to start up the cdr program:


% cdr

You will be presented with a simple user interface:



 Welcome to the PIRL CD burner version 0.0.1 (alpha)

  If you are just starting, you may want to do the first three
  steps in order, premaster, test, and burn.  If you already
  have a disk image that you would like to burn, you want to 
  use option [i], then option [e].

 Please choose:


Premaster (make ISO9660 image of data).......................[p]
Test your new Image..........................................[t]
Burn yourself a new CD.......................................[b]
Test a pre-made image........................................[i]
Burn a pre-made image (to CD)................................[e]
Copy a CD/DVD to the premaster partition.....................[c]
Blank a rewritable CD........................................[w]
Burn yourself a new DVD......................................[d]
Mount your new CD (test CD to see if the burn worked)........[m]

Quit CDR.....................................................[q]

 Your choice?  ==>

First:

The first step you must take is to collect your data under one directory. This doesn't mean you can't have sub-directories, it just means you can't have some of your data on /scratch and some of your data on /CDR. The recorder has access to the following disks: /scratch /trash /CDR /mgs /icyimpact /cassini /galileo You must collect your data onto one of these disks. You should also make sure your data is readable by the users group, or by everyone, otherwise the program cannot read your data and it won't be written to disk. The easiest way to do this is, once you've collected your data, at the top directory issue the following command: chmod -R o+r If you plan on keeping the data around after you burn it to disk, and you don't want such permissions, you'll have to do something more sophisticated. If you need help, contact an administrator. As far as permissions on the CD/DVD, those will be changed so that they are world readable. There are good reasons for this, and it doesn't make sense to change it. The second step you will take is the premaster step (assuming you don't have an existing ISO-9660 image).

Premaster:

This option writes an ISO-9660 filesystem to a hard disk on Grendel. The data you want to burn needs to be under a single directory somewhere on the PIRL system. You should generally put your data in either /CDR or /scratch. If the place where your data resides is not available to Grendel, you will get an error message.

What you will see when you choose p:


Please enter the name of your volume: 
That is, what do you want your CD to be called?
This must be one word; no spaces allowed!

 >  foo

You will next be prompted for the pathname to your data. This must be a full pathname, up to the root directory of your data.


Please enter the directory in which your data resides: 
####NOTE:  You MUST use a full pathname.####

 > /CDR/bar

Next, you'll be asked to double check your options. If they are what you wanted, then you may continue on. If you don't like what you entered, you have the option to fix it. If you don't want to do the premaster step, now's your chance to quit to the main screen. This is important to get correct, if it isn't, you won't actually get the data you expected.


This is what you entered for your volume name:

foo

This is what you entered for your data directory:

/CDR/bar


Are you happy with your decision? 
 [Y(es)/N(o)/Q(uit to main)] >

Test your new disk image:

Your next option is to test the new image. This is a fairly simple test, it just gives you a directory listing of the root directory, as well as a disk usage summary. The disk usage will probably not be exact when compared with the disk usage of your data on another system, there are many factors involved in calculating this number. What you should worry about is order of magnitude approximations here.

Burn:

After you're convinced that your data has been premastered correctly, you'll want to burn it to a disk. You can get the CD-ROMs in many ways, and you'll need one for this step. The burner is running at 8X, so for a full disk, it should take around 9.25 minutes.

Mount:

Once the burn runs, you may want to test whether it worked. If you would like to test the CD, you may use this option or merely take it away and try it on the computer your are working on. Either way, if it worked, great. If not, not all is lost -- you've got yourself a new coaster!

Test quality of a pre-made disk image:

If you bring a disk image from elsewhere, you can check whether the image is any good. This tells you the disk usage information as well as showing you the root directory listing.

What you will see when you select i:


Please enter the full path to your ISO9660 image:
 >

You must enter the full path, including the filename of your image.

Burn a pre-made disk image:

With this option, you burn the pre-made disk image you acquired from elsewhere and tested with the "Test quality of a pre-made disk image" option from above.

What you will see when you select e:


Please enter the full path to your ISO9660 image:
 >

You must enter the full path, including the filename of your image.

Copy from one CD to another:

In order to copy a CD, you'll need to first make an image of it, and then burn the image. This is somewhat similar to doing a premaster, but we use dd because it works and is faster than copying all the data, doing a premaster, then burning. You really should use the "Test your new disk image" option above to be sure you get what you want.

Blank a rewritable CD:

If you need to blank a CD-RW, use this option before writing to it. There may be some CD-RWs that cannot be erased, please inform the admin. staff.

Burn yourself a new DVD:

This option allows you to burn a DVD from the iso9660 disk image you created. It works for DVD-R and DVD-RW disks. It will burn DVD-R at a maximum speed of 2X (2.77MB/s), and DVD-RW at a maximum of 1X (1.385MB/s). There may be some DVDs that cannot be written to using the drive we have, please inform the administrators if this is the case. Burning a full (4.7GB) DVD-R takes about 2 hours, please be patient.

The PERL code that makes up the cdr interface is here. This code can be run several different ways. For the PIRL systems, it is run on the CD server as a login shell. One way of having fancy things like the ability to tell the users who is currently using cdr is to use this expect script to pass that information on to the server. One could also just run the PERL code as an executable script, which requires the input of a username (this can easily be edited out for single user implementations). Have fun.

The University of Arizona Lunar & Planetary Lab
PIRL Webmaster
04 Jan 2003