Creating and Burning a DVD or CD with Solaris 9 Sparc

SysAdmin Topics

How to Create an ISO Image and Burn It to DVD/CD on a Solaris 9 SPARC Host

by Ross Moffatt, September 2008

This tech tip shows how to create an iso file, then burn this iso file to the DVDRW drive. I have sucessfully burned 4Gig DVD's using this method even though the cdrw command suggests it only handles CDs. I expect that this method would also work for Solaris 9 x86 but I haven't tested it.

Note: You need to have a physical DVDRW or CDRW drive in your machine.

To list dvdrw/cdrw drives in your host

This allow you to check the OS "see" your DVDRW or CDRW drive.

# cdrw -l
Looking for CD devices...
    Node                   Connected Device                Device type
----------------------+--------------------------------+-----------------
 /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s2   | TEAC     DV-W28E-R        N.0B | CD Reader/Writer

To check the media in dvdrw/cdrw drives

This example shows a blank DVDRW.

# cdrw -M
Device : TEAC     DV-W28E-R      
Firmware : Rev. N.0B (            )
Media is blank

This example shows a DVDRW with a session (filesystem) already burned on it.

# cdrw -M
Device : TEAC     DV-W28E-R      
Firmware : Rev. N.0B (            )
Track No. |Type    |Start address
----------+--------+-------------
 1        |Data    |0
Leadout   |Data    |1730710
Last session start address: 0

To blank a RW disk

Note that a DVD will take a long time to blank, (approx. 20 mins on my system).

# cdrw -vb all
Looking for CD devices...
Initializing device...done.
Blanking the media (Can take several minutes)...
done.

Creating an ISO file of a directory tree using mkisofs

Here I am creating an iso image file for cdrw to burn to the DVD/CD.

# mkisofs -r -o image.iso <file or directory> . . . <file or directory>
Total translation table size: 0
Total rockridge attributes bytes: 247
Total directory bytes: 0
Path table size(bytes): 10
Max brk space used a000
176 extents written (0 MB)

Burning a ISO file to disk using cdrw

I don't run volume management, vold, you may need to stop this for cdrw to work? /etc/init.d/volmgt stop.
Note: This step can also take a long time depending upon the size of the iso file.

# cdrw -i -vC image.iso
Looking for CD devices...
Initializing device...done.
Preparing to write DVD
Writing track 1...done.
done.
Finalizing (Can take several minutes)...skipping finalizing
done.

Mounting the DVD/CD Disk

Here I mount the DVD/CD filesystem to the /mnt directory..

# mount -F hsfs -o ro /dev/dsk/<cdrom device, eg. c0t0d0s0> /mnt

Now you should be able to cd into the mnt directory and "see" the files burned to DVD/CD. This disk should also work in a Windows host.

About the Author

Ross Moffatt has been a UNIX system administrator for 10+ years and can be contacted at ross.stuff@telstra.com.