Re: problems writing a large file to DVD+R Double Layer disk

[Bill Davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>]

Kish Shen wrote:

Hi,
[I sent this message several hours ago from another email address, but it has not appear yet, so
I am trying again with a different e-mail address]

I am trying to write a .ts file to a DVD+R Double Layer disk, so far without success. The file has a size of 4613734320. I issue the command:

growisofs -Z /dev/sr1 -R -J  pd

where pd is where my files are.

I get the message:

mkisofs: Value too large for defined data type. File pd/....ts  is too large - ignoring

and the file is not written. This is with growisofs version 7.0, and mkisofs 2.01.01a24

I updated my growisofs and mkisofs to these versions because those that came with my Linux (growisofs: version 5.17, mkisofs: 2.01a27) does not recognise the DVD+R DL media:

linux:/home/kish # growisofs -Z /dev/sr1 -R -J pd
:-( /dev/sr1: media is not recognized as recordable DVD: 2B


My system configuration is:

OS: SuSe Linux 9.1, with kernel 2.6.11.4

DVD Writer: LG GSA 5163D

For now, I just want to write the file as a data file to the disk, so I am not worried about DVD compatibility.

Thanks in advance for any help/information on how I can write the file to the disk!

Cheers,

Kish


  

If you are concerned with backing up the data in a way which allows recovery, I can tell you how to do that. I think the portability of any solution to have that file on an optical media is suspect, and may not work in some cases.

Solution #1:  break into smaller files you can recover as one big file and write to disk:

$ split -b 500000 my_huge_file hugefile.
$ mv my_huge_file some_other_dir_for_safety/
$ growisofs -Z /dev/scd0 -R -J .

To recover, mount the disk and:

cat /mnt/cdrom/hugefile.?? >file_on_disk

Solution #2 - you can play the file from DVD:

• Create an empty file of 4400MB (dd if=/dev/zero of=bigfile bs=1024k count=4400)
• Loopback mount the file (losetup /dev/loop0 bigfile)
• Put an ext2 filesystem on the device (mke2fs -b4096 -N2000 bigfile)
• Mount the device as root (mount /dev/loop0 /mnt/temp)
• Copy all of the data to the loop mount (cp -r pr /mnt/temp)
• Unmount the loop device (umount /dev/loop0)
• Now burn the disk, ext2 will hold a 4GB file (growisofs -Z /dev/scd0=bigfile)

Do note, no option to growisofs, just the filesystem image. The only issue with the 2nd method is that you can only mount the DVD on a Linux system.

-- 
bill davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>
  CTO TMR Associates, Inc
  Doing interesting things with small computers since 1979