Baslinux mailing list

[James Miller <jamtat AT mailsnare.net>]

I recently communicated with someone on the issue of writing CD R's
multiple times, and learned something new I thought other listers might be
interested in learning as well.  It's also relevant to the bootable BL CD
topic that's come up recently.  I do so little CD burning that, though
this may be widely known, it's something new to me and perhaps will be to
others onlist.  First, let me clarify that this concerns, so far a I
understand, CD R's - as opposed to CD RW's.  CD R's, as perhaps everyone
already knows, are supposed to be writeable only once, while CD RW's are
made to be written to multiple times.  My source informs me that I was
wrong in thinking that, once you burn a CD R, you cannot put any more data
on it - even if only part of the CD's capacity is used (you will perhaps
recall from our discussion on the proposed BL bootable CD how 99% of the
space on the proposed CD would be "wasted," i.e., not have any files/data
on it).  Well, my source informs me that I was wrong about CD R's in this
regard.  The source claims, on the contrary, that further data *can* be
written to an already-recorded CD R that still has free space on it (like
the BL bootable CD, which would have only a few megabytes worth of files
occupying it's ca 600MB capacity).  In other words, you could take that
bootable BL CD (R), put it in a CD burner, then add the files from
Slackware71 to do the full HD install, as an example.  Or maybe add some
documentation there or something.  My source claims to have done this sort
of thing with CD R's many times.  I don't know if you can go on writing
and writing to the CD until it's full or not: seems like there should be
some limitation.  But it seems it can at least be done more than once.
My source informs me that the potential "gotcha" in doing this is if you
try to write a file with the same name as a file you already have written
to the CD R in question.  So, if you have baslinux.gz there, for example,
and you try to add a file later with the same name, the first baslinux.gz
will get corrupted.  Apparently, the second one does not get corrupted,
though.  In the overall, if my source is correct, wasting space on the
bootable BL CD that's been talked about recently may not be the compelling
issue it seemed earlier.  Input from others onlist who have CD burning
experience and can either confirm or refute what my source is telling me
will be appreciated.

Thanks, James