From BCCD 2.2

Downloading, Validating, and Burning the BCCD to CD

Congratulations! You just spent anywhere from minutes to hours (perhaps days?) downloading the BCCD image, now how do you actually make the thing boot?

The Pre-Burn Process

Having found your way to the BCCD official downloads, found at the BCCD download site, you should first verify the integrity of the download. Automated uploads of the BCCD images are accompanied by a corresponding md5sum on the web page listing. For example, the bccd-i386-2004-07-21T12-0500+pvfs2.iso image from the download site has a corresponding md5sum of c64fe61b906be8227996a110930f3328, as given on the web site.

Running the md5sum program on the downloaded file should produce the exact same value. If it does not, either the integrity of the file on the server has been compromised, or the download has been compromised and you should not continue to burn the image to CD. For example, in Linux the command would be:

[gray@aplaga]>md5sum bccd-i386-2004-07-21T12-0500+pvfs2.iso
 c64fe61b906be8227996a110930f3328  bccd-i386-2004-07-21T12-0500+pvfs2.iso
[gray@aplaga]>

Once you have a download image that matches the checksum on the server, you're ready to burn the image to a CD or perhaps load the "raw" image under VMWare.

Burning the BCCD Download File under Linux

There are several nice front ends in Linux to use for burning CD images to CD/DVD media. kb3, xcdroast, and gcombust are a few graphical frontends to CD burning software.

The most fundamental CD burning application however, is cdrecord, which is a command-line utility. cdrecord is very easy to use for burning raw CD images. Starting from scratch, you will need to know what " device " your burner is attached to. cdrecord can be used to probe your system bus for cd burners using the command

[gray@aplaga]>cdrecord --scanbus
Cdrecord-Clone 2.01a29 (i686-pc-linux-gnu) Copyright (C) 1995-2004 Jörg Schilling
NOTE: this version of cdrecord is an inofficial (modified) release of cdrecord
     and thus may have bugs that are not present in the original version.
     Please send bug reports and support requests to <cdrtools@packages.debian.org>.
     The original author should not be bothered with problems of this version.

Linux sg driver version: 3.1.25
Using libscg version 'schily-0.8'.
scsibus0:
       0,0,0     0) 'TOSHIBA ' 'DVD-ROM SD-R2212' '1013' Removable CD-ROM
       0,1,0     1) *
       0,2,0     2) *
       0,3,0     3) *
       0,4,0     4) *
       0,5,0     5) *
       0,6,0     6) *
       0,7,0     7) *

The above shows that the system has a CDRW/DVD combo drive attached to the ide-scsi emulated bus, " 0,0,0 ." Newer versions of cdrecord under the 2.6 kernels will allow you to bypass all of this ide-scsi nonsense and use the raw device directly, such as " dev=/dev/hdc ."

Some possible show-stoppers from here forward are:

• You don't have permission to run the cdrecord program
• You don't have permission to access the CD device
• You need sudo privileges in order to utilize cdrecord
• Not only do you need sudo to run the cdrecord command, but you also need to overcome the rootsquash option of your NFS server

If any of the above issues are present, send an e-mail to the bccd mailing list, and we can walk you through troubleshooting your setup. Don't forget to subscribe to the list, too!

Otherwise, assuming that the BCCD image that you downloaded and validated is bccd-i386-2004-07-21T12-0500+pvfs2.iso and that the cdrom device is attached to 0,0,0, the cdrecord command to burn the downloaded image to CD would be:

cdrecord -vvv -eject dev=0,0,0 driveropts=burnfree bccd-i386-2004-07-21T12-0500+pvfs2.iso 

(The driveropts=burnfree option may not be available to you if your drive does not support burnfree support.) The vvv option refers to "very, very verbose", the -eject option will eject the drive when the operation is finished (which is good if you're bored waiting for the 4x disc to complete) and the =driveropts=burnfree option (if available) will vary the rotational speed of the disc commensurate with the size of the input buffer (the disc will rotate a full speed when the input buffer is full, and slow the rotations when the input buffer is nearly depleted which lowers the risk of underruns).