Inspired by this article I took about a dozen old Panasonic 4.7GB DVD-RAM written in 2004 using UDF with and without packet writing in Linux to see what became

Inspired by this article I took about a dozen old Panasonic 4.7GB DVD-RAM written in 2004 using UDF with and without packet writing in Linux to see what became of them after 20 years storage. I ended up with unaccessible disk content due to pktcdvd of Linux kernel 6.9.7 reliably freezing two different computers (Thinkpad T61 and ThinCentre M92P) at first access try. So the pktcdvd module has fallen prey to bit rot and nobody seems to have noticed because no one uses rotating disk media anymore in 202x. The few disks which were once written to directly without intermediary pktcdvd turned out to all have a broken UDF file system. And as i then learned the hard way, there still is no fsck.udf for Linux in 2024, a mere twenty years later. The udf-capable fsck of IllumOS/OmniOS[1] was unable to fix the file systems. I ended up running photorec on these disks to salvage at least some of their content and finally refomatted them with the much more reliable and proven XFS. Probably won't use these disks anymore due for them being so incredibly slow on writing (more than 6(!) hours writing a 4GB sized file). [1] https://src.illumos.org/source/xref/illumos-gate/usr/src/cmd/fs.d/udfs/fsck/ https://src.illumos.org/source/xref/illumos-gate/usr/src/cmd...