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Unintentional And Unwanted Spanning-Part Deux (Read 2473 times)

Big_Al

Gnarly

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I love YaBB 1G - SP1!

Posts: 48
Los Angeles

Unintentional And Unwanted Spanning-Part Deux
Apr 29^th, 2008 at 8:31pm

April 29, 2008

Dear Forum,
It's been quite a while since I've surfed these pages and I just saw the reply to my original post:

March 3, 2007

Dear Forum, Long time no type, but my Ghost has been behaving itself! Well, that is, up until now.

OK, as many of you are aware, I am a DOS groupie and use my home-made "Make" and "Restore" DOS floppies to do my Ghosting.

Here is what I mean: http://radified.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1150190239/9#7

Now, as to the reason for this post: I just ran the "Make an Image to Hard Drive AND to CD both" batch and noticed that the CD did NOT have just the single, big CDR00001.gho file, but about 50 smaller CDR00001.gho's named CDR00001.gho, CDR00002.gho CDR00003.gho etc...

In the past I have never looked at the CD's I made since if they pass the double CRC check the batch file calls for(chkimg,N:\CDR00001.gho -sure ) I know they are OK and don't NEED checking by me.

What is puzzeling to me is WHY the Ghost v7.5 Corporate Edition is making mini-files to the CD, and not one big one like it does to the Hard Drive? Also, I can not get Ghost Explorer to open the files on the CD like I can with the Image on the Hard Drive.

Just to double check, I did a restore from the "Multi-Mini-Filed" CD, and it restored just fine and the OS is working just as it always has. Does anybody have an answer for me on how to make sure the CD makes just 1 big file and not 50+ little ones?

Thanks in advance.
Big_Al

However, there is still no answer as kd6aaj's answer delt with Gigabite sizes and I REALLY don't think DOS has anything to do with my situation.

I checked the sizes on some of my older Ghost Images that I burnt and they were anywhere from 590 Megs to over 670 Megs on the usual 700 MB CD's. And if you think about it, the size, per se, should make no differance at all, as long as it is under about 680-685 MB's.

If the individual files add up to, say, 665 MB's, what's the problem with making one big 665 MB file?

Can anyone bring me some joy so I get one big CDR00001.gho again??

Thanks in advance for any help y'all can be.
Big_Al

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Nigel Bree

Ex Member

Re: Unintentional And Unwanted Spanning-Part Deux
Reply #1 - Apr 29^th, 2008 at 9:12pm

The CD-writing code is making mini-files for its own reasons, to do with buffer-underrun protection - this is something that isn't a problem for anything running in modern Windows, but if you were using computers in Windows 95 you'd remember it was a major issue, and burning CDs in DOS still faces all the same problems.

You can't stop it doing this, because it's breaking them up to stop burning coasters. Once you turn on a laser and start writing bits, you can't stop doing this whenever you like - there are lots of complicated rules around how CDs are structured, all set in place in the 1980's, and the most complex part of that is that is *stopping*. Once that laser is on, the data has to arrive on time or else you have a problem.

To deal with this, the CD-burning code in Ghost is breaking up into spans whenever it's not absolutely convinced that the rest of Ghost will be able to keep up. There are lots of reasons this can happen, almost all them connected to the BIOSes on your motherboard.

For instance, many modern motherboards have BIOSes that lie outrageously to old DOS programs about things like how much memory they have. Many claim to only have 16Mb on every legacy API that DOS uses, and only report the real memory size to newer ACPI-aware operating systems - so instead of Ghost being able to use, say, 256Mb and having lots of buffer space to keep the CD-burning code happy, it tries to limp by, trying to get things done in teeny tiny chunks.

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Rad

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Sufferin' succotash

Posts: 4090
Newport Beach, California

	Re: Unintentional And Unwanted Spanning-Part Deux Reply #2 - Apr 29^th, 2008 at 10:52pm Nigel rocks.
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