The FreeBSD Diary

mkisofs is a tool for creating an ISO file system. I first wrote about it when talking about cdrecord, the tool I use for burning my CDs.

Today I decided to burn some of my source code onto CD. After doing that, I decided to verify the burn by mounting the CDROM and viewing the data. Not all of the data had made it. There were two directories specified on the command line, but only the first made it into the ISO. So I tried again. This time I mounted the ISO file system and checked it. Again, only the first directory made it to disk.

After a bit more investigation, and a simple test case, I noticed the following message during the ISO building process:

# mkisofs -J -L -R -U -r -o repo.raw firstdir seconddir
Warning: creating filesystem that does not conform to ISO-9660.
Already scanned directory seconddir
Total translation table size: 0
Total rockridge attributes bytes: 242
Total directory bytes: 0
Path table size(bytes): 10
Max brk space used c984
48 extents written (0 Mb)

See that Already scanned directory notice? I searched Google, both www and groups, but found nothing related. This problem was repeatable with a simple test case:

mkdir firstdir
touch firstdir/a
mkdir seconddir
touch seconddir/b

I noticed that cdrecord (cdrtools-1.10_1) and mkisofs (mkisofs-1.15.a39) were out of date. So I upgraded. Using portupgrade. Now I had cdrtools-2.0 and mkisofs-2.0. Guess what? Now the problem doesn't occur.

• keep things up to date
• when in doubt, update
• check your backups