How to repair 2.01 Multi DVD gone bad?

[drewmeister]

Please, I have looked all over this forum for a couple of months only to find nothing about DVDs developing an unreadable file/track. Two nights ago I turned off my Seamonkey 2.01 Multisession machine and it refuses to boot since then.

The DVD was getting full, around 90 tracks, and it saved and shut down just like always. It is a machine I built. It has a DVD-RW drive, a floppy drive, four USBs in the back & two in front. The floppy is in there because it is a combo floppy/card reader. I have tried to get it to boot from a USB stick but I never could make it work with my BIOS.

So I have no recourse but to run the multisession Pup. Or do I? I suppose I could try putting the PupSave file on a stick and use the Live CD version of Puppy. But I digress.

One of the files on the first track, I do not remember which one, is trashed, and Puppy tries to crank up but can not read the proper instructions to put the .sfs file on the RAM disk.

Last night I tried make a new DVD by using my SuSE 10.1 box that has a brand new burner. First I copied the seven files on the first track into a directory, mainly to be sure I was reading the old DVD ok. Then I used dd to make an image of the entire disc, including the boot track. My plan was to mount that image in a directory and replace the bad file(s) with good ones by using cp. SuSE 10.1 wouldn't let me do that; or maybe it is just Linux.

When I would type "cp <good source file> <corrupted file>" it always returned "Read-only file system." I tried everything I could think of, including changing file & dir perms and including "-o rw" in the mount command. The mounted loop device remained read-only.

The computer has a Verizon EDVO card in it which I use to connect to the outside world; that connection is shared with my SuSE box and my Thinkpad (the only [working] Windoze computer I have left). At this moment I am stealing time at the office to write this. WHAT TO DO NOW?

Two questions/pleadings: 1) Does anyone have any ideas about fixing that disc? 2) Has anyone successfully written a new multi-DVD after filling one up?

Still in New Orleans, still in the mud.
--Andrew

[Flash]

...Two questions/pleadings: 1) Does anyone have any ideas about fixing that disc? 2) Has anyone successfully written a new multi-DVD after filling one up?...

I've filled up a couple of DVDs but both times I started the new DVD by booting the full DVD, burning the latest stable version of Puppy onto a fresh disk with burniso2cd, then saving the session without shutting down.

Obviously if you can't boot the full DVD that won't work.

As I understand it, the Puppy multisession DVD loads the last session first, then the next-to-last, etc., as it boots. So if I read you right, the problem must be in the last session, not the first. Can you not tell Puppy at the boot prompt to ignore the last session?

How about this for a Rube Goldberg solution to your problem:

• 1. burn a Puppy CD then use it to burn a multisession DVD with the same iso as the one that won't boot.
  2. Boot the new multisession DVD, configure it exactly as the bad one was, then shut down, saving the session as you did for the first session of the bad DVD.
  3. Boot the CD, mount the new multisession DVD and somehow burn all the sessions from the bad DVD except the bad session to the new DVD. (As an experiment I once added a session to a multisession DVD with TkDVD. It wasn't in the boot sequence so I had to mount the DVD after I booted it in order to be able to see the session I had added, but at least it didn't screw up the DVD so it wouldn't boot.) I guess you'd have to copy the good sessions from the bad DVD to a hard drive first, and change their names too.

I'm sure that wouldn't work as written, but you get the idea.

Or, you could burn a new multisession DVD, boot it, then mount the bad DVD and transfer just the files you want to save to the new DVD. The problem with that approach is, there is no master index that shows what's in each session. You have to open each session and see.

As for what caused your DVD to go bad, I have no idea. I've filled up a DVD with more than 100 sessions so I don't think that's it. If you mount the bad DVD and then right-click on "hdb" in ROX and choose "disk usage" from the drop-down menu, what does it say?

[BarryK]

I don't recall what version I introduced the concept of "rollback" for
multisession CD/DVDs. You just start with, for example:
puppy pfix=2
to ignore the last 2 saved sessions, they are permanently blacklisted.

The blacklisted sessions are saved in a text file, and any session can be blacklisted
by manually editing that file ...look in /initrd/sbin/init, in the function that loads folders, and you will see the part where it reads the blacklist file -- I don't recall
the name of the file but you can easily find out.

[drewmeister]

BarryK & Flash, a big thank you. I indeed tried ignoring the last track, and the last two, but the problem is track 1 having a corrupted file. I won't have time to work on it today -- I'm out of town for a wedding. Hopefully I will have time tomorrow to study Flash's message (I am about to be late to the wedding and was only able to skim it this morning) and get back on line.

Thanks again & I'll be in touch,
--Andrew

[BarryK]

You can ignore any session, just by creating the file "/.badfolders" and enter
into it the names of folders to be ignored, one per line.
So, real easy to ignore the first session.
After creating /.badfolders, reboot.

[drewmeister]

Barry & Flash,

I spent a week (of nights) trying all sorts of stuff. By Saturday afternoon I had decided to begin fresh and use the live cd method rather than a multisession-dvd. The cheap dvd did corrupt a boot file, so why not try another pup-save medium? I found some things that may be usefull to others, I hope I am not too wordy describing them.

First I used Seamonkey 2.10 and a 1GB SD flash card. Surprisingly, 2.10 did not "just work" with my EVDO card in a pci adaptor. It was a surprise because it did indeed just work with 2.01, but not with 1.0.8. I think it has something to do with the Yenta driver, for the pci adaptor. Wonder why that is and if there is an easy fix.

Well 2.01 worked "out of the box" with the EVDO wireless card. Happy day. But when I booted, configured keyboard and monitor, and saved it to the flash card it got an error, well into the boot process. That cost me a day, as it took me that long to try "acpi=off" on the reboot.

Then things looked good and I made a custom live cd using the menu option Simple from the Setup menu. I was sure I checked /etc/rc.d for the changed files rc.local0 and rc.modules, but they were not there when I booted from the new custom cd. Easier to install again rather than investigate what I had done wrong.

Everything works great now, and it took only a few hours to get all my old dotPups back and my bookmarks/cookies for FFx off one of the tracks of the bad dvd. That dvd deteriorated during the week to the point that Puppy could not see it as having any tracks at all. My salvation was that when this began I copied all the files on it to my SuSE box so I could get them from there this past weekend.

Yesterday I made copies of both the custom live cd and the flash card, just in case. And yes, I tested them last night. :^) So far I have not installed Firefox, using Seamonkey instead. Seamonkey does not have extensions and I will see if I can live without Google Space.

I noticed that little icon displaying free memory is now at 374 whereas when Puppy was on a multi-dvd it said 402. Not to worry though.

Barry, Puppy Linux is truely amazing. Are the rest of us lucky to have you on the planet or what? Puppy is obviously a labor of love and skill. Thank you for that. Besides the Puppy box at home, which this entire thread is about, I have one of those Via based very small diskless/fanless boxes sold through the forum at my office. I love it too. Both are demos of how versatile Puppy is, and it's free and it WORKS!