Because HP DVD drives sucks, prospertine is temporarily without a CD/DVD burner, so I need to use the one in aenea.

I’d never burned a CD outside of Windows before, so I didn’t know where to begin. Turns out FreeBSD includes a tool, burncd, that interfaces with the burner itself. I just need to burn the Fedora Core 4 install CDs, so I already have the CD images, making it pretty straightforward.

There’s more info in the handbook, under Creating and Using Optical Media.

I’m trying this, straight from the handbook:

burncd -f /dev/acd0 data FC4-i386-disc1.iso fixate
burncd: open(/dev/acd0): Permission denied

Hmm, ok, so I need to run as root. That’s unfortunate:

aenea# burncd -f /dev/acd0 data FC4-i386-disc1.iso fixate
next writeable LBA 0
writing from file FC4-i386-disc1.iso size 649838 KB
written this track 649838 KB (100%) total 649838 KB
fixating CD, please wait..

Wow, can it really be that easy?

Um, no. I know the ISO images are correct, as I verified the SHA-1 hashes with the Fedora Core download page. And yet, when I verify the disc in the Fedora Core installer, discs 1 and 2 have failed, and I’m sure 3 and 4 will too. That said, they’re not totally bogus; I was able to boot disc 1 and get most of the way through the installer, but it destabilized and crashed during file system creation.

So, what’s wrong w/ burncd? Do I have to do something special to make it work? Maybe it’s working fine, and the FC media verifier doesn’t work right w/ 700MB CD-Rs. That seems unlikely.

I’ll try the install again…

UPDATE: It worked fine. FC4 reported each disk as failing verification, but it installed and is running fine. Oh well.