Gentoo Environment On DVD-RW... Possible ?

OllieD · n00b Joined: 28 Jun 2004 Posts: 3

My Thought Is. Would It Be Possible To Install Gentoo On A DVD-RW So The DVD Could Be Used As A Mini Hard Drive. That Way Your Gentoo Would Be Portable And You Could Carry It To Any PC With A DVD Drive. Like A Live CD With Extra Features In A DVD Writer Capable Of Writing DVD-RW Media ?

I Think This Would Be A Kool Idea. If It Is Possible I Would Attempt To Build Such A Mini Gentoo Environment For My PC.

So My Question Is. Is This Possible ?

Dolio · l33t Joined: 17 Jun 2002 Posts: 650

The only problem I forsee with this is that I don't think there is kernel support for writing directly to DVD-RW. Usually you make an iso9660 filesystem and burn it to the DVD using another program.

To use it like a hard drive you need (correct me if I'm wrong) packet writing. This is in some kernels (I know 2.6.7-rc3-love2 has it), but it's experimental, and so far it only supports CD-RW. So I think you're out of luck.

Right now you might be able to get by using some sort of weird double-session setup where you have some read-only partions and on startup you pull a ram disk off another session and mount that read-write, and then burn it back to the DVD on shutdown. But I don't have nearly enough expertise to tell you how to do that.

Keep an eye on the packet writing support, and when it matures, you'll probably be able to do this. I think it's an interesting project (although it'd undoubtedly be slow

).
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placeholder · Advocate Joined: 07 Feb 2004 Posts: 2500

Yeah, there's no way to do it as of now unless you use DVD-RAM perhaps and even then I'm not sure how that works so.... Oh yeah, you also don't have to capitalize the first letter of every word. That looks sloppy....

Dolio · l33t Joined: 17 Jun 2002 Posts: 650

FYI: There was a post to the Linux Kernel Mailing List today with a patch adding support for DVD+RW and CD-RW drives as writable block devices. The patch is against kernel-2.6.7-bk13.

I'm going to see if I can get it to actually compile, and if I can, I'll see if I can put together a single patch for it. However, I don't have any DVD+RW discs on me, so someone else will have to test.

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Dolio · l33t Joined: 17 Jun 2002 Posts: 650

This patch compiles with my usual config (plus cd/dvd packet writing, of course). It applies to vanilla 2.6.7 (contains both -bk13 and the packet writing).

As I said, I have no way of testing this, as I don't have DVD+RWs, but apparently you should be able to mount DVD+RWs read-write with this.

You'll need to format them first. For information see Documentation/cdrom/packet-writing.txt

link: http://dolio.dyndns.org/users/dolio/packet_dvd_block.patch.bz2

I take no responsibility if this blows up your computer, summons the Candyman, etc. Use at your own risk.
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They don't have a good bathroom to do coke in.