How to get the DVD-RW to mount as a writable device instead of ROM

automountingdevicesdiskdvdreadonly

I am trying to use my laptop (running Debian Jessie) and an external USB DVD reader/writer to burn an ISO to a DVD-RW.

However, upon inserting my disk, it appears to have been detected as read-only:

# lsblk
NAME                   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE  MOUNTPOINT
sr0                     11:0    1 700.1M  0 rom

The following appears in dmesg when I connect the reader:

[10549.386006] usb 1-1: new high-speed USB device number 10 using xhci_hcd
[10549.522596] usb 1-1: New USB device found, idVendor=152e, idProduct=2571
[10549.522618] usb 1-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[10549.522634] usb 1-1: Product: External USB DVDRW Drive
[10549.522647] usb 1-1: Manufacturer: HLDS Inc
[10549.522660] usb 1-1: SerialNumber: DA00000000000000100
[10549.524138] usb-storage 1-1:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
[10549.525467] scsi5 : usb-storage 1-1:1.0
[10551.538610] scsi 5:0:0:0: CD-ROM            HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GP30NB30  1.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0
[10551.625316] sr0: scsi3-mmc drive: 24x/24x writer dvd-ram cd/rw xa/form2 cdda tray
[10551.626540] sr 5:0:0:0: Attached scsi CD-ROM sr0
[10551.627054] sr 5:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg1 type 5

How do I get this DVD to mount in such a way that I can actually write to it?

Best Answer

This question looks indeed like a duplicate of question 68426. But the answers there are partly wrong in respect to dd.

The fact that Linux reports the drive as CD-ROM does not indicate that it cannot be used for writing. CD-ROM is just one of the drive's many jobs. Yours is obviously an LG DVD burner. Classified by Linux as "24x/24x writer".

Whether you can write to an optical medium by help of dd depends on the medium type:

Formatted CD-RW, formatted DVD-RW, DVD-RAM, DVD+RW, BD-RE, and BD-R in modes POW or RRM are supposed to work with dd. These media behave in many ways like slow hard disks or giant floppies. Linux would be willing to mount them writable if you put a writable filesystem on it. E.g. ext2 or FAT. (But Don't ! Performance is awful. Media wear-off is terrible. Use burn programs or dd to write them.)

Before dd works on newly purchased media, formatting has to be done once by dvd+rw-format or one of the burn programs below. (dvd+rw-format is the formatter companion of growisofs.)

CD-R, unformatted DVD-RW or CD-RW, DVD-R, DVD-R DL, DVD+R, DVD+R DL, and BD-R in mode SRM can only be written by help of a burn program. Candidates in Debian Jessie are on command line wodim for CD, growisofs for DVD/BD, cdrskin, xorriso for CD/DVD/BD. GUI programs are xfburn, brasero, k3b and possibly some more.

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