growisofs on a 2.4.32 kernel fails immediately with the nondescript error:

  :-( write failed: Invalid argument

It turns out that this is because growisofs uses O_DIRECT to read the
.iso image, which is broken on 2.4.32 with ext3:

http://groups.google.com/group/linux.kernel/browse_frm/thread/cbc0c9986ef5752e

That discussion seems to suggest that this is a kernel problem rather
than a growisofs problem, but no kernel solution is proposed there,
and it's very easy to work around by undefining O_DIRECT in growisofs.c.