Contents
Making an Image
The best strategy I have found for making CDs, is to actually create the directory structure you require on the CD,
on your hard drive. It is possible to graft data to new directories in the image file, but it leaves problems with
the permissions and ownership of the directories and long cumbersome commandlines.
Given the price of hard drives, if you can afford a CD Writer there is no reason you should not have a hard drive large
enough to set aside a partition or directory for mastering data.
You do not have to duplicate all the data already present on your machine in this data mastering directory.
You can use symbolic links, so long as you are certain that you will not end up including all sorts of data you had
not intended to.
It may be beneficial however as part of an overall archiving / backup policy to mirror critical data in other directories and preferably
onto other physical drives. It certainly increases the safety of valuable data against mechanical failure.
If this mirroring is done into your data mastering partition then you have a neat solution which meets both needs. This is what I do.
There is a check box in the Specialised group on the Image Type tab page which allows the following
of symbolic links. Used with care, this can reduce the amount of data required to physically present in the mastering directory
drastically.
Create a symbolic link with:-
ln -snf /target /link
or use Midnight Commander or some other decent file manager to create the necessary link.
The danger of symbolic links is of recursion through following further links in the directories you have linked to.
You could include huge amounts of data you did not intend archiving.
The associated danger of infinate looping, where a link leads to another link which points back to the first link should not occur
as I have only used the safer mkisofs -f switch which does not suppress loop checks.
The documentation for mkisofs seems to suggest that you cannot link to directories with the -f switch. Experimenting I have
found you can link to mounted block devices if you like, mkisofs will include the contents in the image file.
So down to a practical example.
On my 3rd IDE hard drive, on which I have a formatted Linux partition, mounted as /L: (just makes it easier for me to remember
what is on each drive if I use the DOS assignment letter, since I run several operating systems on my machine) I create a directory called
/L:/cdimage
This directory is the root directory for the image file.
In this directory are 2 sub-directories and 3 sym links ( each pointing to a directory on my 2nd IDE hard drive, which is my Linux drive.)
I have a copy of /etccalled suprisingly enough, /etc!
There is one of /root/prog/versions called versions, which is my archive directory for programming code.
The sym links are to directories which contain no sym links themselves, being collections of downloaded rpm's, source etc, which
I want to have an up to date archive of so I can delete the files on hard drive if necessary.
When I make the image I specify the path /L:/cdimage in the Source Paths combo box on the Source
tab page, and what I get is an image with a directory structure like:-
.
..
/etc
/versions
/packages
/downloads
/uploads
Of primary importance on this subject is IF YOU CAN'T MOUNT AND VIEW AN IMAGE, DON'T WRITE IT TO DISC
The major exception is when making a multi session CD
So whenever you make an image, mount it and view its contents. If it won't mount or part of it cannot be viewed or appears incomplete ditch it and start again.
However, before doing so, just check that you have set the [Mount Point] on the Images tab page!
If you are not sharing data on CD between Linux and DOS or early Windows variants, use Rock Ridge option but not Joliet. It seems to increase the reliabilty of the images made and Joliet doesn't do relocations and can't cope with duplicate file names.
Writing Data Image(s) to CD