Burning ISOs

This material is work-in-progress ... Do not follow instructions here until this notice is removed. (Last edited by Zcrayfish on 31 Jul 2023.)

Burning an image to a CD or DVD

On systems that ship cdrtools (e.g., Gentoo, openSUSE, NetBSD, Slackware), you can use cdrecord to write an image to a disc. For example:

cdrecord -v speed=4 alpine-standard-3.8.0-x86.iso

If there's only one CD drive on the system, it should be auto-detected. If not, find the device name using lsblk and specify the dev option. For example:

cdrecord -v dev=/dev/sr0 speed=4 alpine-standard-3.8.0-x86.iso

Alpine, like Debian, has cdrskin, which can be invoked just like cdrecord above.

See also:

• Arch Wiki on CD/DVD Burning Example:

  growisofs -Z /dev/dvd=/path/to/dvdimage.iso

Copying an installation image to a USB key

• Arch Wiki on Copying Install ISOs to a USB key, though note that mkarchiso generates hybrid ISOs, where, as far as I know, alpine-iso does not

Creating an image from a CD

To do the converse operation, copying a CD to an ISO image, execute:

dd if=/dev/cdrom of=/path/to/cdimage.iso

Mounting an ISO image

To mount an ISO without physically burning it to a CD:

modprobe loop LOOP=`losetup -f` losetup $LOOP /path/to/cdimage.iso mount -t iso9660 -o ro $LOOP /mnt ... # when finished umount /mnt losetup -d $LOOP # this step may happen automatically when you run umount

or see Arch Wiki on fuseiso.

See also

• Gentoo page on converting image files