HOWTO: Read Vista-burnt UDF DVDs on Ubuntu Linux

Recently I got my hands on a DVD which I couldn’t get to mount. The message that appeared consistently in dmesg was:

UDF-fs: No fileset found

Searching the forums I found out that this is a widespread problem. Vista uses some kind of non-standard UDF which only Windows can read. I was very tempted to run to the Windows PC in the other room and let it eat the disc, but I was curious if there was any other solution.

Many suggested mounting manually with -t udf, but that didn’t work. Another suggestion was patching and recompiling the kernel. I was obviously NOT in the mood to do that. Digging a bit deeper I found that there is actually a less greasy solution. The two relevant links are one and two. I will describe now the exact procedure I used to get my Linux box to recognize the Vista-burnt DVD. Note that, because of the rapidly changing environment, this will probably NOT work on anything OTHER than *Ubuntu Hardy with kernel version 2.6.24.

long long on Windows/Dev-C++/MinGW

[sarcasm on]
(because Moldova is probably the last country where programming competitions are still held on Windows)
[sarcasm off]

The long long data type has been introduced in C as part of the C99 standard. On 32-bit machines it is a 64-bit signed integer data type. The printf/scanf formatting string for this type is %lld.

Using Dev-C++ and the MinGW port of the GNU C Compiler on Windows, one would expect programs to run the same way they do with GCC on Linux. But no! Apparently MinGW calls the Windows libraries, so every time you call printf or scanf you’ll end up using Microsoft’s version of the functions!

And of course Microsoft cares about backwards compatibility, so when C99 was published they didn’t switch to the standard, keeping their non-standard %I64d formatting string instead!

[subsides into an angry stream of unintelligible muttering]