Burning ISOs

This material is work-in-progress ... Do not follow instructions here until this notice is removed. (Last edited by Msi on 1 Jul 2018.)

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 drive using lsblk and specify the dev option, for example:

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

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

See also:

• Arch Wiki on CD Burning
• Arch Wiki on 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, whereas 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, just do:

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 umount

or see Arch Wiki on fuseiso.

See also

• Gentoo page on converting image files