Making an ISO from CD/DVD on Linux

To create an ISO file from a physical DVD/CD/Floppy/USB/Anything. Use the command ‘dd’ this creates a bit for bit copy of the original file/partition/device.

dd takes two parameters these are if - input file and of - output file.

In this case the input file will be the CD and the output file will be the ISO.

dd if=/dev/sr0 of=/home/osaka/cd.iso

My optical drive is located at /dev/sr0. I found this out my automaticly mounting the disk and using mount to view all mounted devices.

osaka@computer ~ $ mount
...
/dev/sr0 on /media/DRIVER type iso9660 (ro,nosuid,nodev,uid=1000,gid=1000,iocharset=utf8,mode=0400,dmode=0500,uhelper=udisks)

If the disk you are copying is large then it might take a while, during which you will not see any output, to make sure it is working monitor the size of the newly created ISO file.

osaka@computer ~ $ dd if=/dev/sr0 of=/home/osaka/serial-drivers.iso
2400+0 records in
2400+0 records out
1228800 bytes (1.2 MB) copied, 1.84111 s, 667 kB/s

You can then mount the ISO with:

mount /home/osaka/serial-drivers.iso /mnt -o loop

You might want to look up mkisofs which does the same but for directories.

mkisofs -o /homw/osaka/folder.iso /radnom/dir/

21 Jul 2012 | Tags ( CD dd DVD ISO Linux )