How to Format (Erase) DVD+RW / DVD-RW Disks in Linux

Posted on In Linux

This post introduces how to erase / blank / format a DVM+RW media on Linux in the command line.

First, you need to find out the device of the DVD/CD+RW drive on your Linux box. For example, on my box with Linux 3.3.4 kernel, my DVD/CD+RW drive is /dev/sr0. You can also see what the /dev/cdrom links to to find out the device path for the DVD/CD+RW drive. For example:

# ls /dev/cdrom  -l
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 3 Aug  1 17:00 /dev/cdrom -> sr0

To format/erase a DVD+RW disk, we need the dvd+rw-tools tool. Install it if it has not installed yet:

# yum install dvd+rw-tools

Then we can format/erase the DVD+RW (actually no need to blank them explicitly)/DVD-RW disk using the dvd+rw-format tool after inserting it into the drive:

# dvd+rw-format -force /dev/sr0 

BTW: the command to erase a CD+RW disk using cdrecord (provided by wodim):

# cdrecord dev=/dev/sr0 blank=fast

Eric Ma

Eric is a systems guy. Eric is interested in building high-performance and scalable distributed systems and related technologies. The views or opinions expressed here are solely Eric's own and do not necessarily represent those of any third parties.

5 comments

  1. Thank you for posting this. After all my GUI-based DVD burning software failed to recognise (and therefore not be able to blank) a DVD to which a corrupted ISO was burned, this solved the problem.

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