I eventually bought a Panasonic UJ850 DVD burner and I am able to copy my daily backup to a DVD+WR w/o any problems. I have done a few restores to confirm that.
Since my daily backup resides on a Flash Drive accessed via USB 1.1, I now strongly suspect that I could have bought an external USB DVD burner at a lesser cost and that I would have had no problems burning my backups via this slow channel. I'm not going to buy an external burner just to verify this, but the growisofs web page also tends to suggest the same in the "Technical Ramblings" paragraph: As long as the output is directed to a DVD+RW it would appear that burning is suspended when input data is not forthcoming and will resume later on when input data is again available without the process timing out so that writing to the DVD+RW will simply continue at the exact same spot, eventually resulting in a valid copy of the input data, no holes attached. At least that's how I understand it. :-) Apart from copying my backup, I have also been able to copy a couple of live linux CD images (grml and the current ubuntu) to DVD+RW's and I was absolutely amazed at how fast it went. My long-dead SCSI over PCMCIA cardbus external CD writer would take over an hour just to burn an .iso image to a CD-RW where growisofs now only takes about five minutes. Generation gap, I guess? Since the .iso images were on the laptop's HD and not on the Flash Drive that's connected via USB 1.1 port, the only problem I ran into was that while growisofs is burning an .iso image, the system becomes totally unresponsive & unusable for other purposes. I'm not sure why this happens since CPU utilization does not appear to be that high (but then as far as I can tell, the old laptop may be so overwhelmed that it is no longer able to provide a reliable CPU utilization counter in the first place). Maybe the MB's bus is not capable of sustaining the required bandwidth? In any case, I'm pretty sure at this point that despite indications to the contrary by other posters, an external DVD burner connected to a USB 1.1 port would probably have worked OK, at least for DVD+RW's. Copying my backups to DVD's would have been somewhat slow, but this might have been a blessing in disguise because it would have ensured that DVD burning episodes did not bring the old laptop to its knees. Since the machine is so overwhelmed by the growisofs process when burning data from the albeit slow HD (4200rpm I believe) that it's no longer able to even display the process's execution counters, I now plan to nice it a bit and see if I can get away with that and still end up with a usable backup on the DVD. In my case at least it looks like it's more the inherent slowness of the machine itself that has problems with burning DVD's rather than USB 1.1! Anyway folks, that's the good news for now and I do hope that this rant may benefit someone at some point -- naturally I refuse to be held responsible should they ending spending hundreds on hardware that don't work or fries their old laptop.. etc. The above works for me, ape at your own risk. :-) Thanks! CJ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
