Creating, mounting and burning ISO's with linux

This tutorial simply demonstrates how you can quickly create, mount and burn ISO's with linux.

ISO's can be created using the 'mkisofs' command - as follows (assuming that /tmp/test/ is the data we would like on the ISO file system):

mkisofs -r -J -o cd_image.iso /tmp/test

The '-r' switch ensures that all files and folders are readable to the client - i.e. the entity that mounts the ISO.

We can also use the '-J' (MS Joliet) switch to ensure that compatability with Windows clients is maximized.

Before burning the ISO to our media lets peform a test run by mounting it on the local system:

mount -t iso9660 -o ro,loop cd_image.iso /mnt

On my Fedora 25 box I got the following error:

mount: /tmp/cd_image.iso: failed to setup loop device: Invalid argument

This is likely due to the fact that the 'loop' kernel module is not enabled - to check it's present we can run:

lsmod | grep loop

and to enable we can run:

modprobe loop

and to enable permanently (on Debian based distros):

echo loop >> /etc/modules

or on RHEL based distros:

echo loop > /etc/modules-load.d/loop.conf

and retry mounting:

mount -t iso9660 -o ro,loop cd_image.iso /mnt

Once you are happy - we will unmount the ISO and burn it to disk with:

umount /mnt

To look for available CD / DVD writers we should issue:

wodim -scanbus

I got a 'wodim: No such file or directory. Cannot open SCSI driver!' returned when issuing this - it appears that wodim expects a SCSI device and to support anything else you need a compatability driver!

Initially I thought that the sg module was not enabled - but it turns on it was. After running

wodim dev=/dev/sr0 -checkdrive

It successfully found the drive.

It turns out in Fedora 25 you need to manaully define the block device within the wodim.conf file:

echo 'cdrom= /dev/sr0' >> /etc/wodim.conf

and run the scan again:

wodim -scanbus

Now we can write the image with:

cdrecord -v speed=16 dev=1,0,0 -data cd_image.iso