The worst thing…

…when an application does not work as expected is to give weird and unhelpful error messages. This is what happens with cdrwtool, part of udftools.

It was supposed to prepare a CDRW disc for packet writing, blank it, format it and create the UDF structure, but it keeps giving a weird error message from the beginning. It cannot not even blank the cd! I also compiled cdrwtool from CVS, but had the same results. I own a Pioneer DVR-109 dvd writer and since I am no quiter, I plugged in an old cdrw TEAC 4x writer and tried cdrwtool and suddenly… there was light! It worked!

So, there seems to be an incompatibility issue between my Pioneer writer and cdrwtool. As the problems arise only when using this utility, I believe that its code is incomplete. I really don’t expect it to be further developed, as it can only be used with CDRW discs. Who wants to waste time with 700MB storage space anyway! I only use DVDRW media for packet writing.

On the other hand, I had some CDRW discs formatted in the windows os in order to check if I can use them under linux mounting them as large floppy disks. They did actually work as expected and the pktcdvd kernel module seems to work well with CDRWs. Rewritable DVDs formatted with native linux tools work perfectly as well.

Currently I am working on an alternative way to prepare a CDRW medium for packet writing. In short, I create a UDF image in my HDD using dd, loseup, mkudffs and then burn it on the CDRW disc. It does not currently work, probably because the way it was burned on the disc is wrong, but I feel that I am close to a solution here…

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