Burning Optical Discs in Windows at a Command Prompt

I have been getting 100% success burning re-writable optical discs using the command line in Windows 2000 and Windows XP using Microsoft's free utilities, so I am publish my notes. I burn approximately 30 discs each workday for three years (conservatively) backing up vital information (PHI) and having to perform a full restore every two months. That's 23,400 successful writes and 18 successful reads. I did all my testing with re-writable discs. I will update this page after testing write-once discs.

I have found that Verbatim discs are very dependable, as are Maxell discs, whereas Memorex can report a successful burn and then fail a read verification.

Limitations include:

  1. All files you want to burn must reside in one directory. mkisofs.exe makes an ISO from this directory (Copy the remote directories and files into one then delete later)
  2. You must use the erase switch (-erase) with a DVD-RW, but you must omit the erase switch for a DVD+RW or the burn command will fail.

To make an ISO file you will need mkisofs.exe and cygwin1.dll which you can get here: http://smithii.com/?q=node/view/9 they are bundled with additional utilities. I can't remember where I got mine, but I have had no problems with any 2 GB limit, or burning the same ISO to CD-RW, DVD-RW, or DVD+RW.

To burn a disc, you will need Microsoft's free tools which you can get here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9d467a69-57ff-4ae7-96ee-b18c4790cffd&displaylang=en. You'll need to install it and grab the tool(s) you need (dvdburn.exe and/or cdburn.exe).

I use DIRUSE.EXE to log the disc size after burning. You can grab it here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927229

Here are the commands that work for me:

C:\mkisofs.exe -v -J -R -l -o c:\backup\DVDRW.iso "%USERPROFILE%\my documents"
C:\DVDburn.exe f: -erase c:\backup\DVDRW.iso

Change the directories as needed. You can view how I use it in a batch file here: DVD+RW_backup.txt