Writing it to CD

[irvine]

ok. time to razz out the idiot. I know how to write the iso's to the cd, but it says i don't have enough space. i have like 30 megs short. not sure how that worked out. i'm using a standard 650mb cd. I read the short manual on this and it said something about transparent compression. anybody know how to use that or otherwise solve my problem. i'm creating this cd on a windows xp box, if that helps.

[Harry Kuhman]

... i'm using a standard 650mb cd. ....

Standards change.The iso was built for a standard 700 meg CD.

[firebyrd10]

Don't know about you, but my disks are labled as 650 yet I can burn 702 megs on them.

Mines are re-writes BTW, don't know if that makes a idfference.

[Harry Kuhman]

Don't know about you, but my disks are labled as 650 yet I can burn 702 megs on them.

Mines are re-writes BTW, don't know if that makes a idfference.

All of the CDR disks I have purchased in the last two years are marked as 700 meg, either on the CD or on the package or both. When their size is checked they all come out 702.83 megs (79 minutes 57 seconds of audio storage). I still have a few 650 meg blanks around, and 650 meg blanks reported their storage as anywhere from 650.83 to 658.88 megs of storage, depending on make (there was quite a difference in size on the old 650's but I've only ever seen 2 different sizes on 700 meg CDRs: 702.83 and 698.87 on some older blanks from (noew defunct) Prime Peripherals). I haven't seen any CDRs for sale in recent years that have the red book specified 650, I expect it would be hard to find them.

CDRW's are a somewhat different issue. I have purchased both 650 and 700 meg CDRW in the past year. 650's seem to be more common, but there are certainly 700's out there. I have an Imation700 meg one right in front of me and it's what I use for most of my Knoppix and related Live Linux on CD test burns.

Lots of software Including Nero will let you "overburn" and put more than the specified limit on the CD. In simple terms it does this by continuing to write data into the space that, by the spec, is the "write out" area and not intended for use by data. It's a bit of a crap shoot just how much data you can get there. I've had good luck overburning 705 megs or so to a 700 meg CDR, but if I push it much further I see problems.

Obviously some makers could provide disks with enough space for 700 meg and still mark them as 650, but I know of no cases where this has been done and I can't see of much reason for them to do so. I've certainly passed on some 650 CDRWs and bought 700 meg CDRWs from different makers, so if manufacturers are under lmarking media they may have lost sales over it.

I have also read claims of CDR media on the Internet that supposedly can hold as much as 900 megs of data, but I've never seen any such media in any retail outlet. I don't think I would trust it, and with DVD availability and the dropping cost of media I expect I would adopt DVD technology rather than fool with this.

By the way, a 700 meg CDR (or CDRW) actually holds about 800 megs of data. The extra 100 megs is taken up by extra error recovery data that is written. Fortunately, the CD industry has not gone the way of the lame hard disk industry and advertised their media based on raw data numbers, they base it on formatted data (although I've never seen an 80 minute CDR that was really rated to hold more than 79 minutes and 57 seconds). You can actually store 800 megs of information on a CDR if you work around the error codes. That is what is done by the format that stores SVCD on a CDR. They are trying to fit as much video as they can on a disc, and if a bad bit comes in then they just accept a (hopefully slight) break-up in the MPG2 stream. The video will recover and the data stream will go on. Many DVD players didn't have the processing power to do the error correction in real time anyway. But it's certainly not a good approach for storing data, as errors will occur and make the data worthless (this also makes it unreasonable to extract the MPG2 file back of a SVCD disc; it can be done but you will increase errors in the file, perhaps without realizing it).

So my advice to the first poster is still to use media, CDR or CDRW, that is rated 700, not 650.

[strawbeard]

All of the CDR disks I have purchased in the last two years are marked as 700 meg, either on the CD or on the package or both. When their size is checked they all come out 702.83 megs (79 minutes 57 seconds of audio storage). [......] but I've only ever seen 2 different sizes on 700 meg CDRs: 702.83 and 698.87 on some older blanks from (noew defunct) Prime Peripherals).[......]

Bad luck, that I still have 2 batches of 699MB CD-Rs (stamped '700MB', different brands). The 3.6 ISO almost fills the CD-R completely (only a few 10KB left). The burner didn't complain, but I got read errors when Knoppix started mounting the big system image. Two out of 3 times it recovered and worked properly throughout the remaining session. I thought something was wrong with my burner. Finally I tried a CD-RW with true 702MB capacity and this _worked_.

Obviously the CD blank must be 1-2MB larger than the ISO file. This problem had cost me hours and an extra download. A small note in the CD burning instructions might be useful.