ISO Images

ISO Image Command Line Examples

How to Determine What Your CD or DVD Drive Uses for the Mount Point

• Use the "eject" command to open the drive, and then use the "dmesg" command to view kernel messages, the last of which should be something like this:

[50208.534770] SELinux: initialized (dev sr0, type iso9660), uses genfs_contexts

In the above example, the CD/DVD burner is device sr0, so the mount point of it is /mnt/sr0.

Create ISO Image From Any Disk or File Structure

• If it is a disk you are copying to an ISO image, first un-mount it, using the umount command:

(Only one of the below commands are required, depending on your system and how it automatically mounts disks)

umount /mnt/cdrom

OR

umount /mnt/sdd

OR

umount /mnt/sr0

OR 

umount /run/media/username/disk_name

• Use the dd command to create an exact image of the disk or file system:

(Again, use the correct mounting point for your particular Linux system)
In all of these examples using the dd command, the tags if= and of= stand for "InputFile"= and "OutputFile"=

dd if=/dev/sr0 of=ISO_Image_File_Name.iso

OR

dd if=/directory_structure_name of=ISO_Image_File_Name.iso

• A really nice way of creating an ISO image using the dd command along with some other command line arguments,

to create a nice ncurses based status indicator while it creates the image, allowing you to monitor the progress of ISO image creation:

(pv -n /dev/sr0 | dd of=MP3s_G_through_J-3.iso bs=2048 conv=notrunc,noerror) 2>&1 | dialog --gauge "Creating ISO Image...  Please stand by..." 10 70 0

Create ISO Image from Mounted CD or DVD:

• In the example below:
  • Replace "IMAGE_NAME.ISO" with what you want to name the ISO image file.
  • Replace "/run/media/dir_disk_mounted_on/" with the entire path that the disk is mounted on.
  • This exact same command can also be used to create an ISO image containing any mounted directory tree.
  • Switches used in below example: -v = verbose output, -J and -R = Juliet & RockRidge extensions included for Windows compatibility.

genisoimage -o IMAGE_NAME.ISO -v -J -R /run/media/dir_disk_mounted_on/