I have RARed my FLAC files with 10% recovery and am going to use IMGBURN to burn the RAR files onto DVD-RW. Any suggested settings beyond the default in IMGBURN?

This is what I used to do as well. I recommend you select "Verify Against Image File" under "Write" options.

In another thread I prompted this and they recommended I use DVDisaster instead of using the RAR recovery feature. With DVDisaster you create recovery ECCs that allow the program to recover damaged sectors on DVDs or CDs.

EDIT: I still use RAR with 10% recovery backups and DVDisaster, but I am looking for a free utility (licensed as free for public and commercial use) which will create archives with some sort of recovery file like RAR. I found ARJ however I couldn't seem to get that to work properly.

Thanks for the reply! I think I am going to stick with WINRAR and IMGBURN for now. What settings do you use in WINRAR under Archiving Options? I use

Put Recovery File
Test Archive File

My WinRAR settings are with some reasoning behind the ones you do not use:

• Compression method = Store: if the archive does become damaged in some way, then less of the actual data will be corrupted
• Put Recovery Record (10%)
• Test archive Files
• Lock archive: this then prevents any further manipulation of the files I want to be archived

I still would like someone else to discuss DVDisaster and describe their experience with it. I have had successful experience with RAR archives with recovery records. Therefore, I am hesitant to rely entirely on a method that I have not tested--regardless of praise.

I agree and is the same reason I am sticking with .RAR! When I went to burn my rar files with IMGBURN I had the option of building a ISO9660, ISSO9660+Joilet, etc. What do you suggest? When I tried each one of these it told me I have reached the size limit of the format?? Each rar is 4.37 GB...am I missing something? My guess is that it should be a UDF file. What do you use?

As far as I know, you cannot burn files that large to the DVD. Also, it doesn't make sense to have one giant RAR with all your backup files because if the beginning of that RAR gets too corrupted then you are up a creek no matter what 10% recovery part you have. You have a better chance with individual RARs, each RAR an album.

If you don't want to take the time to re-RAR your albums, then I recommend you set it to split the RAR into 100MB files, each file will get a 10%recovery backup.

EDIT: How about I give an actual answer to the real question you just asked? I seem to use ISO9660 + UDF with no apparent problems. Here is a little information on the filesystem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_9660 . I can't see a reason why ISO9660 + Joliet + UDF would be bad.

I dont mind doing the RAR files again to ensure a better chance of recovery. I am dealing with 750GB of files so doing each album is probably not possible due to time. So I guess the best option is to set WinRar to Split Volumes to a much smaller size, you suggested 100mb. Does that sound like a safe size? And then I'll have IMGBurn create images that are DVD size.

Thanks for your help on this!!!

If you are willing to learn, you could create a BAT script that runs the RAR.exe on those folders. I have limited experience with BAT scripts and loops but given a list of directories, which can be made through TREE. It might take a little research but it never hurts to know BAT scripts.

Good idea! I am somewhat familar with BAT files. I write them for work on occasion and so may give it a try.

Good deal. If you get a simple method, please post it. I have had little success running a FOR loops in a BAT. There are says I miss the simplicity of MATLAB.

I will post it here once I complete it.

So I tried a set out. Ran Winrar on a folder of 5.5GB of files and had it split the files into 100mb chunks. Then used IMGBurn to build a ISO files that were 4.5GB in size. It created 3 files........Bluegrass.i00, Bluegrass.i01 and Bluegrass.mds. What is weird is that these first two files dont show up as ISO files. When I went to write these files in IMGBurn it sees the MDS file but not the other two, so I load it and try and burn it and it says the file to too large for the disk? Shouldnt it detect the two parts? Maybe I am missing some ???

First: You have to create your ISO in Build mode. I can tell that you made your ISO image to a device not formatted in NTFS, most likely FAT32. The FAT32 file system does not support files larger than 4GB and ImgBurn knows to split the file into two parts, and then use the MDS for burning later. You must understand that imgBurn will not warn you when you go over the actual 4.35GB file limit. It just assumes you are making an ISO for a DL 8.5GB DVD.

Second: when burning the image you must use Write mode. To answer your first question: yes, it will/should recognize those two files as a single ISO through the MDS file. If it saw the MDS then it should have written the ISO just fine--unless the ISO you made was too large for a standard 4.35GB disc.

You used WinRAR on a 5.5GB folder. My questions:

1. In total: how large was the set of RAR archives created?
2. When you made your ISO image: how large were the resulting IS0 and IS1 or what ever they were named?

EDIT: OFF TOPIC
If you haven't noticed the pattern yet, I have this bad habit of posting a response before I have actually addressed the specific problem you've questioned about. If you don't see an EDIT at the bottom of my post... give it another five or six minutes before I really button down the response.

In total: how large was the set of RAR archives created? 5.17GB

When you made your ISO image: how large were the resulting IS0 and IS1 or what ever they were named? 4GB and 1.17GB

The drive they are being written to is NTFS although I might try a different drive just for the heck of it. The strange thing is that when I look at the files they have a extension of .i00 and .i01 not .iso. Is that correct or should it be .iso.

I have to go to my wife's parents house for dinner in about 30 minutes so I will check this once more before I leave. Otherwise I will back on later tonight.

It is being written to an NTFS drive and it is creating I00 and I01 files??? That is not typical for NTFS... again that is typical to writing to a FAT32 formatted drive... That is what I was trying to explain earlier with IS0 (zero, not "O") and IS1, I simply couldn't remember the exact extensions.

That makes no sense. I have been using ImgBurn for more than a year now and I have never encountered settings that cause an ISO from build mode to be automatically split into multiple files without that FAT32 malarchy.

Question 1: You are not putting all the RAR archive parts onto the same ISO, correct? For there to be 5.17GB of RARs there would have to be ... 5.17ish-GB of ISO...

Question 2: You are using the MDS in ImgBurn ... because then there should not be any problems. Are there?

Question 1: You are not putting all the RAR archive parts onto the same ISO, correct? For there to be 5.17GB of RARs there would have to be ... 5.17ish-GB of ISO..

I am loading 5.17GB of rar files into IMGBURN to make an ISO and then have it set to split the file into 4GB segments. SHould I be able to burn each of one these separately , the MSD seems to try and load both files only instead of burn each separately. My goal is for IMGBURN to split up into specified size (4GB ) automatically. It can do this right?

My bad, I did not give your numbers that good of a look and saw that yes your segments do add up to 5.17GB of an ISO. In short, no ImgBurn does not do what you describe. This is called spanning, and while it is a nifty feature... it is not included in this version of ImgBurn.

And I believe I confused you before. Further explanation, if it is needed, is below. If not, skip the quote and go to the solution.


When you load the I00, ImgBurn does not recognize that as an ISO image file, just your garden-variety file that will not fit on the ISO9660 (+UDF +Joliet) filesystem of the DVD.

A simple test to confirm this: load all 5.17GB of RAR archive parts into ImgBurn again, but look at the information tab, hit the calculate button.

For instance, I loaded 13GB of my Rock archive and it tells me under "Min. Req. Media" that I need a BR-R/RE (one of those Blue Ray discs) or an HD-DVD (high definition DVD).

Loading roughly 5GB of files into ImgBurn and the minimum required media for this: a dual layer DVD (DVD+/-R DL).

That is where the problem is coming from. It might be a drag that you have span the files/folders yourself. For some reason, the author of ImgBurn is not interested in spanning...

That makes sense, I had assumed that spanning was possible, thanks for the explanation! What I will do is take each music genre (which are held in there own folder) and create a set of rar files splitting them into 100MB volumes. Then select 4.3 GB of rar files and build the ISO and burn that.

Update: I just tried it and it built correctly, here is the weird thing, I rebooted and now it is building correctly.

One last question....if I create a set of rar files and set it to split them into 100Mb chunks and one chunk goes bad that doesnt effect the rest does it?

I am going to assume you meant that it isn't building correctly after rebooting. I can only assume that somewhere you have changed a setting.

Can you describe what it isn't building correctly? I can only guess you mean the folder structure... Please, describe more.

I started that sentence, got a cup of coffee and came back and finished it Sorry, I meant to say it wasnt building correctly and now that I rebooted it is! I am writing the first one as I type this

Is there any negative to just burning the ISO and leaving out the MDS? I wonder if the MDS files are my problem. When I select the MDS file to write it thinks the file size is way larger than it really is.

Fantastic! Glad it is working out.

Did you try anything with that BAT script? I am still interested in it for (now) purely academic purposes. If not, I would gladly enjoy some online BAT scripting references that make sense to a putz that has spent his academic career programming graphing calculators and MATLAB.

I havent had time to work on it yet. I collect IBM processors and had a large chip sale this weekend and had to focus on that. I will probably work on the scripting this week at work

Thanks so much for your help and patience, I used to have all of my FLAC files backed up on a server but that server has gone away and so until I get a 1TB drive to back up my files to I wanted to make some DVD's to ease my mind. Took too long to build my music collection to lose it .

Am I correct regarding the rar files? If one file goes that doesnt affect the rest with it does it?

As far as I understand it, if only one part is gone completely, then the only thing that is lost is files that directly fell into that part of the archive. However, each part contains its recovery record, so hopefully it shouldn't happen. This is also why I an being extra paranoid and footing DVDisasters ECC recovery files. Each ECC is made from a DVD ISO and is about 650MB... so each time I collected enough files, *fup*, to a DVD they go as well.