[ale] Question: What does "Fixating" mean for burning cd?

[David A. De Graaf]

On Fri, Oct 27, 2006 at 11:10:08AM -0400, James Sumners wrote:
> The fixation process is the process of closing the disc to any further
> writes. The burn process boils down to three steps: 1) writing the
> table of contents, 2) writing the data, and 3) leaving the disc open
> to further writes or "fixing" the disc so that nothing else can be
> written to it.

And to give another non-answer to your question, here's a surprising
datum (to me).  Last night I tried to write the FC6 x86_64 iso from a
file on another machine accessed via NFS over a wireless link.  I knew
that writing this image should take about 40 min, but transmitting it
by wireless would take 3.5 hours.  I was surprised to find that it
worked.  cdrecord and the NEC ND-3550A DVD?RW drive were perfectly
content with writing in spurts.  I had always thought it was critical
to maintain a more rapid supply of data than could be written to avoid
buffer depletion.  The sha1sum of the new DVD was correct!  
The command was
    cdrecord -v -eject dev=ATA:1,0,0 driveropts=burnfree -dao \
      /net/datium/h3/iso/fc6/x86/FC-6-x86_64-DVD.iso

I assume the burnfree option is important.

I mention this merely as evidence that writing need not be continuous
and uninterrupted prior to fixation (whatever that is).

> 
> On 10/27/06, tom <tfreeman at intel.digichem.net> wrote:
> > I grabbed the cd images of Fedora Core 6 yesterday, and I'm happily
> > burning my physical cd's now. And a question came to mind which I'm not
> > quite sure how to google (yet), so I will also ask the collective wisdom
> > of this list.
> >
> > When burning the cd, cdrecord will announce as the last step it is
> > "fixating" the disk. What the heck is physically happening during this
> > process? The extent of my understanding of the process is that the image
> > file is being placed on the cd medium by melting the bit pattern of the
> > image into a spiral track on the cd. The image file already contains
> > directory information, so what is happening during "fixating"??
> -- 
> James Sumners
> http://james.roomfullofmirrors.com/

-- 
	David A. De Graaf    DATIX, Inc.    Hendersonville, NC
	dad at datix.us         www.datix.us