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

[James Sumners]

1) My answer is not a "non-answer".
2) Your assumption is correct. If you had not told your drive to use
"burnfree" you would have hit a buffer underrun almost immediately.
The burnfree method was devised to prevent buffer underruns by
allowing the burn to sort of stutter through no matter how fast the
data stream is to the drive. The final quality of a disc that relied
on burnfree heavily during the burn process as opposed to the quality
of one that did not is vast. I'm willing to bet that if you reburn
that disc without relying on burnfree, your new disc will read a lot
faster than your current one.


On 10/27/06, David A. De Graaf <dad at datix.us> wrote:
> 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).



-- 
James Sumners
http://james.roomfullofmirrors.com/

"All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts
pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it
is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become
drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted."

Missionaria Protectiva, Text QIV (decto)
CH:D 59