> is there anyway to have growisofs format the entire media as an iso9660 > filesystem?
Yes, if you fill it all up with files ;) > if so, will i be able to mount it read/write? No. The iso9660 filesystem driver does not support writing to the filesystem. The filesystem has to be ready-made (by mkisofs) and is then written/appended as disk image to the disk. > essentially > treating it as a hard drive. This is what Andy's kernel patch is good for. You can use any filesystem with it, as long as the filesystem itself supports writing. iso9660 is the only one which doesn't, its design doesn't allow for this scenario so it's not just not implemented, it's not possible. That's why udf was created. The catch of the "you can use any filesystem (except iso9660)" is that filesystems are not optimised for this type of use, and performance will be very poor. From a practical point of view performance is close to useless, unless you only make small changes. Test it yourself if you want to know for sure. As previsously discussed, udf is supposed to fix this, but my own results with Linux-udf are that it is only somewhat better than ext2 in a few cases, and beyond any stretch of usable in others. You are also "paying" in other costs, e.g. its bugs. In summary, Andy's patch is mega-cool, but of only limited practical use because of a lack of a filesystem which is usable with it. Sad, but the current state. Your best bet for backing up new files is to use iso9660 and growing that by adding new files to it. Forget about tar. Alternatively, as I said before and as hard disks are cheap, you can read a dvd as disk image to hard disk, enlarge the filesystem, muck around with the files on it to your likeing, burn the filesystem back to dvd. Ext2 is a good choice for this. If you read the files from dvd often you want to optimise the ext2 at least a little, this can be scripted (I have mostly done this). I am unsure what the advantages of readcd are over dd for reading filesystems to hard disk. If an iso9660 is grown with growisofs, does isoinfo -d report the new size correctly? Volker -- Volker Kuhlmann is possibly list0570 with the domain in header http://volker.dnsalias.net/ Please do not CC list postings to me. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
