[Info-vax] Issues with burning latest Hobbyist VAX/VMS ISO to CD?

[Joe Bloggs]

On Thu, 5 Apr 2012 08:21:08 -0700 (PDT), BillPedersen <pedersen at ccsscorp.com> wrote:

>I am following up on some queries I have been getting about issues with burning the latest Hobbyist VAX/VMS ISO to CD.
>
>I have a report from a hobbyist which suggests he gets a "the selected disk file isn't valid" error from just about any method he has tried to burn the CD with.  He has suggested the "ISO format is old".  He has apparently tried with Windows 7, ISO Buster, and CDBurnerXP without luck.
>
>So, I fully expect there are folks out there that have done this successfully, what did you use?  We would like to get this documented so we can help future Hobbyists.
>
>Thanks,
>
>Bill.

I'll try to reproduce/document later what steps I used, but my normal approach had 
been to  use any of the gui wrappers around cd-record on the Fedora distros. 
(Gnome-baker, brasero, AcetoneISO2, Kb3, etc).

When I've run into problems, half the time, it had turned out to be the media.
(there's much to be found via Google on which companies *currently* make the 
 better/best CD/DVD media)

Equally as devilish, the other half of the time, it's been the burner itself. 
or worst case: both.


And I shouldn't quite say half, as a certain amount of failures are due to 
trying an (ambitious) burning speed, or being careless wrt. using only a unloaded system.

If for example, the media is rated for 16x, you might best try only up to 12x.


I'm not suggesting that hardware/media problems while burning cd/dvd's are typical,
but it happens commonly enough, that one should consider the hdw/media,
especially when at wit's end. 

Also checksums can be valuable for ruling out false negatives.
I find that on MS-Windows, the burning s/w (Nero, and such) often falsely reports errors. 


# isoinfo -d -i /dev/sr0  # look for block size (usu 2048), and volume size # cd/dvd checksum
# dd if=/dev/sr0 bs=2048 count=141035 conv=notrunc,noerror | sha256sum      # cd/dvd checksum