So, I had a client ask me about our internal RHEL 5.5 ISOs he was trying to burn to disc.  He could never get all of them to pass Anaconda’s mediacheck feature.  The client was using Windows and Roxio to burn the CDs which I’m not familar with.

Now, I normally skip the media check.  I’ve had bad experiances with it myself.  Yet, I’ve never had issues with installing from bad CDs unless the CD was, actually, really bad.  But, the media check should pass in any case.  I needed to create CDs that actually passed.

RHEL 5.5 Server i386 Disc 1 always seems to pass.  Passed for the client and it passed for me when I used Basero or whatever that graphical program in Fedora 12 is.  None of the other discs would however.  Yeah, the default CD burning tool in Fedora would not burn discs that the RHEL 5.5 media check would verify.  Suddenly, I remebered my previous bad experiances with media check.  I don’t trust it.  It wastes time.

Finally I whipped out my old pal cdrecord.  Which now calls itself Wodim.  (WTF is that?)  Forunately, it was still friendly enough to burn CDs that passed the mediacheck tool.

cdrecord speed=16 dev=<CDR> -dao -pad -v -data <ISO>

Now, the real question, how is a normal person supposed to know that that is the incantation needed to burn a Fedora/RHEL ISO?  How do they do that on Windows?