[NTLUG:Discuss] 2 Questions about creating CD's from iso images.

[kbrannen@gte.net]

Jack Snodgrass wrote:
> On Thu, 2003-01-02 at 23:08, Wayne Dahl wrote:
> 
>>Ok...let me ask this again...because I don't think I got the answer I
>>was looking for...
...
>>Ok...here's where you're losing me guys.  When you record the iso image
>>using the above info, doesn't cdrecord (or any other CD burner software)
>>just burn one big file with a .iso extension?  I tried this with Gnome
>>toaster, got one file with the filename psyche-i386-disc1.iso...nothing
>>you could see any files with.  Does cdrecord take that command and pull
>>everything out of the .iso file?
> 
> ... snip ....
> 
> everything that you burn to a CD is an .iso image. If you use a program 
> to put data on a CD, it makes an .iso image out of the data and you end
> up burning the .iso image to the CD anyway. You just don't know that 
> your burning an .iso image. ;) 

Exactly.

> 
> mkisofs takes a group of files and packages them up into an .iso image 
> that you can burn to a CD. 
> 
> Also you can mount a .iso image to a virtual drive ( I forget how eactly
> at the moment ) and look at it like it is mounted in your CD. 

I do:

mount iso_file -r -t iso9660 -o loop /mnt

Then you can "ls" it, or whatever, to see what's there.

I have a script which I use for backups which does this sort of thing. 
Ignoring some stuff you don't need, it looks like:

# various commands to get the data into a single dir, then cd to it
mkisofs -v -l -J -L -R -o $backup_dir/cdimage.raw .
# we can look at the image by doing:
ls -l $backup_dir/cdimage.raw
mount $backup_dir/cdimage.raw -r -t iso9660 -o loop /mnt
ls -l /mnt
umount /mnt
print "look good?  <return> or ^c"
read line
cdrecord -multi -v -fs=8m -dev=1,0,0 -speed=8 -data $backup_dir/cdimage.raw

Your -dev arg will probably be different, but that's about it.  Note that when 
you get the ISO file (what I call cdimage.raw above), that's the output of a 
mkisofs command, so you need to skip that step.

HTH,
Kevin