Make an ISO file from Folders or CDROM drive in Linux

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If you want to create an ISO image of a CD/DVD or a folder and its contents for archive purposes, copies, easy mounting, burning out, and other purposes, Linux comes with two quick and easy to use command line utilities to make this happen dd and mkisofs.

First you will need to open a terminal ("CTRL + ALT + T" in Ubuntu) and type in the following commands for the operation you want to accomplish.

CD/DVD Drive:

Type: sudo umount /dev/cdrom to unmount your CDRom drive from the system.

Then type: dd if=/dev/cdrom of={what you want to call the file name here}.iso bs=1024

This will copy the contents of the CDRom drive to an ISO file in your Home directory under your username.

Then you will want to remount your drive. In recent versions of Ubuntu, you can go to the Places menu and click on CDROM to mount automatically. If you can't automatically mount you may need to execute the following commands:

sudo mkdir /media/CDROM #Makes a new folder called CDROM under /media folder. Do this command if you don't have a CDROM or similar folder under media that you can use else skip this step.

sudo mount /dev/cdrom /media/CDROM #Mount your CDROM drive to your /media/CDROM folder so that you can start to read from the drive again.

Folders:

Type: mkisofs -r -o {what you want to call the file name here}.iso /{Location of your folder here/

You should now have a xxxxxx.iso file in your Home director under your username. This file can be mounted through the command line, a helper application, burned as an ISO, stored, etecetera.

Congratulations! You made yourself an ISO file!

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