I think that may have worked, if you had a CD/DVD-RAM drive and -RAM media. It's possible that may have worked at some late date with +/-RW, too, I guess? I'm 99.999999% certain that never worked with ordinary +/-R media, unless the Linux kernel developed that feature set after I stopped burning discs. Not being about to do that in the first place was why tools like cdrecord, cdrdao, wodim, et al. came into existence. -Adam Get Outlook for Android<https://aka.ms/AAb9ysg> ________________________________ From: John Lange <john@johnlange.ca> Sent: Sunday, March 29, 2026 10:13:47 AM To: Continuation of Round Table discussion <roundtable@muug.ca> Subject: [RndTbl] Re: Roundtable Back on the original thread, correct me if I'm wrong but isn't the .iso file already in the correct raw format to be burned on the disk? I haven't done it in a long while but back when the main way to build a linux distro was to boot from CD/DVD, I used to just use "dd if=/my/file/distro.iso of=/dev/cdrom" and I don't recall ever having an issue with that. I somehow threw away the computer chassy that had my last dvd drive in it so I can't even test this theory anymore... On Tue, Mar 24, 2026 at 9:45 AM Adam Thompson <athompso@athompso.net<mailto:athompso@athompso.net>> wrote: A CD-R/RW/DVD-R/RW device is not a normal random-access writable device. You cannot simply write bits to it the same way you write bits to an HDD or SSD. The special burning programs (e.g. wodim) first send commands to the drive to find out what kind of disc is in there, and once that's known, they send special commands to prepare the drive for writing, then sends the data in a particular format via a special interface, then finally sends the commands to the drive to have it write out the correct track padding and postamble. There are several burning modes you can use to create a disc from an ISO file; normally it doesn't matter very much, you should be able to go with whatever your drive or burning program uses by default. If wodim et al complain the disc in the drive is read-only, that's because it is. Or at least your drive thinks it is. Make sure you do in fact have a drive capable of writing the size of ISO onto the type of disc you have, and if that all checks out, just throw the first disc away and use a new one. There are hundreds, probably thousands, of guides to burning discs on the Internet - even at the end of the physical media era, it could still be pretty complicated depending on what you were burning in what format to what kind of media using what kind of drive with what program. You're in for a bunch of reading to figure this all out, I'm afraid. -Adam Get Outlook for Android<https://aka.ms/AAb9ysg> ________________________________ From: Tait Palsson <votetaitpalsson@protonmail.com<mailto:votetaitpalsson@protonmail.com>> Sent: Monday, March 23, 2026 5:06:58 PM To: roundtable@muug.ca<mailto:roundtable@muug.ca> <roundtable@muug.ca<mailto:roundtable@muug.ca>> Subject: [RndTbl] Roundtable Hello MUUG Roundtable, Is it just me or is it impossible to burn a .iso to an optical disc? I have tried with dd, various iso writers on various distributions but these either grey out or do not list the target device, and with multiple pieces of hardware. I am always met with an error that the media is read-only when the disc drive is read and write. I also tried /dev/sr0 and its alias /dev/cdrom but nothing different happened. An internet search tells me that special software like wodim, growisofs, or Brasero could be needed. Why and is this just me? If dd did work I imagine that I could use bs= to bring down the write speed and improve accuracy. Sincerely, Tait _______________________________________________ Roundtable mailing list -- roundtable@muug.ca<mailto:roundtable@muug.ca> To unsubscribe send an email to roundtable-leave@muug.ca<mailto:roundtable-leave@muug.ca> -- John Lange