[NTLUG:Discuss] ISO images too large...

[terry]

Wayne Dahl wrote:
> On Mon, 2003-10-06 at 09:17, Wayne Dahl wrote:
> 
>>Ok, I've reached my wits end to figure out what I'm doing wrong here. 
>>I'm attempting to write the RH9 cd's from the ISO's I downloaded.  I'm
>>using XCDRoast (latest version) and when I tell it to calculate the size
>>of the image from the disc 1 of the ISO, it's coming up with a
>>calculated size of almost twice what a CD will handle.  Nothing I have
>>been able to do will get it to fit the image onto 1 disc and I don't see
>>any option to split it onto 2 discs.  I don't remember having this
>>problem when I burned the images for RH8.  What am I doing wrong here?
> 
> 
> Well, I found an answer to this, although, I'm not sure why it was. 
> This was a case of reading too much stuff.  Since it had been so long
> since I'd burned a CD, I googled for CD burning and found a HOW-TO page
> that completely led me astray, so far as using XCDRoast is concerned. 
> Using the info on that, I attempted to use mkisofs prior to burning and

You're making this out to be much more complicated than it is.  If you 
download an ISO, you don't need to use mkisofs to create an ISO if it 
already is one. You'd only need to do that if you had a group of files 
that need to be consolidated into one ISO image, and xcdroast will do 
that for you when you: Click on "Create CD" and choose "Master Tracks" 
and select the directory containing the assorted target files.  Then you 
click on the "Add" button and tell it to "Add to root directory of CD." 
  Then  you go to "Create session/image", click "Calculate size" and 
then "Master to image file"  writes the contents of the directory you 
choose to an ISO image file in the temporary directory and from there, 
it's on to "Write Tracks",  "Layout Tracks", "Add", "Accept track 
layout" and then "Write tracts".
When you're done, "Delete Tracks" [from temporary directory].

> it created one big .iso text file and putting it in the same directory
> along the downloaded iso image.  Somehow or other, when I would select
> the downloaded iso image, XCDRoast apparently was looking at both and
> attempting to use them both to burn, even though only one was selected. 
> Consequently, whenever it calculated the size and compared it to the
> media, it returned an error saying the media was too small.
> 
> I stumbled on the answer to that when I deleted the file mkisofs created
> and had just the .iso I had downloaded in the directory.  XCDRoast then
> calculated the correct size. I still made several coasters though,
> because it kept creating .iso files on the CD's...not the file systems.
> More frustration led me to the XCDRoast web site (which is probably
> where I should have started to begin with- DOH!) and found help in their
> FAQ's.  My mistake was that I had the .iso files stored in a different
> directory than the HD directory XCDRoast was looking at.  The answer was
> in the setup...in the setup screen, under HD settings, you select the
> directory to use for Temporary Image Storage Directories.  Here's where
> it gets confusing.  If you go to the Create CD screen, select Master
> Tracks, on the Master Source tab, you get a File/Directory view and a
> Session view.  Using the File/Directory view, you can select files to
> burn to CD and select what directory you want them showing under on the
> new CD.  

Just select the root directory, don't put them in any directory.

> If you select the Create session/image tab, you will see where
> it will calculate the size of the image and can write from there.  What
> it DOESN'T tell you is that it will create an image that is not an iso
> file system and will store it in the directory it sees the files in you
> selected.  So...I had XCDRoast looking for temporary image files in
> ~/New/RH9 and had the actual iso's in ~/New/RH9/ISO/RH9_discx.  Once I
> moved the iso files directly to ~/New/RH9, XCDRoast worked like a
> charm.  

Yea, you were doing the same process twice.  If you skip one of those 
duplicated steps, you'll do okay.

> 
> THIS WAS NOT A VERY INTUITIVE PROCESS!!!!  There would have been NO way
> I would have figured this out if I hadn't found that one paragraph on
> the XCDRoast website.  The HOW-TO really did lead me astray on this
> one.  Sometimes reading the documentation really doesn't help if you're
> reading the wrong documentation.  Problem is, how do you know you're
> reading the wrong docs if you've never done something before...or it's

I think you were suffering from "information overload".

> been so long you've absolutely forgotten what you did?  Mine was trial
> and error...and LOTS of frustration.  Hopefully, I won't have this
> problem in the future.
> 
> Hrm...I smell something burning.  Time to go make that Smoothwall CD. 
> :)
> 
> Wayne
> 
> 
>

My comments are not to criticize you or you're post, but to inform the 
uninformed.  Once you learn the process, xcdroast is east to use and has 
options enough to burn any type of CD, data or multimedia, with a great 
deal of versatility and control.

I think xcdroast is a very good program.   Although it could be made 
simpler by eliminating options which would in turn limit versatility, 
but who wants that. It could however, use some documentation so I'm sure 
that any of you gifted technical technical writers would be more than 
welcome to make a contribution.  It would be nice if it came with a 
"Help" file/option, or a more elaborate man file.