Greetings to all! Just ordered some distros from FozenTech.com (Suse11.1, Mandriva Free2009, Fedora 10 and others). Since they've arrived i've been trying to share the love with my pals but i have a problem anytime i try to roast out the DVD's. After it has finished burning the new copy does not boot from start up. Is it a security from FrozenTech to make us go back to them and buy or can this problem be solved? I've also tried making ISO's with this command

# mkisofs -J -r -T -o /tmp/your.iso /mnt/cdrom

and burning out with k3b, all to no avail.
Any help will be appreciated. Cheers!

Can't you just download the iso's from the websites of the distros you want, from the internet? Links to most of the distros can be found on this site.
http://distrowatch.com/
There is no charge for downloading for most of them.
cheers,
jdk

cud download but wud take forever coz dere is really poor bandwidth down here. DVD's have to have continuous download and if you want to use a dowload manager to continue it usually doesn't support for DVD's. The moral of this story is that the image will be erroniously yours.

I don't know about Frozentech and possible security technology built in their discs but I don't think there is anything like that on them. Not sure what Mandriva or suse use for their cd burning but in KDE there is K3b and that is one of the best and feature rich front ends I have seen so far. Just choose to copy your disc but do not create a multi session disc, iow close the session. there are some optical drives out there that do not handle reading multi session cd/dvd's with open sessions very well. also, try burning at a speed that your computer can handle with ease rather then burning as fast as it can and rely on the buffer under run technology too much. the way i see it with this technology: its good that it exists but if the system relies on it too much (read: more than once per disc per burn) it is better to burn slower.

good luck

Making a new .iso file from the filesystem view of the cdrom seems complicated and error prone. I don't know exactly what is wrong with that command, and I'm sure there is a correct command that would work. But the concept is bad.

It should be easy to read the .iso directly off the CD. I'm surprised no one here has told you that command.

I always do such things with ImgBurn in Windows and what you want to do is trivial an obvious in ImgBurn.

K3b in Linux is nearly as easy as ImgBurn in Windows. I don't know for sure that it can read a CD as a single .iso file, but I expect it can. I just don't know the right command.

I hope you understand at least the conceptual difference between:
A) Reading a CD as a directory tree of file and converting that directory tree of files to a bootable .iso file.
B) Directly reading the image from a CD to duplicate the .iso file that was used to originally write that CD.

xzibit-d12,

Read the DVDs with dd, so you get an image of the DVD.
This will put a file dvd.iso in your /home/<username> directory
Before you burn the image, you can mount it to look at
Now burn it to DVD as an image, not a file.

Keeping the DVD bootable requires that the boot files at least, don't move around on the DVD.

K3b will make a bootable iso for you and will then burn it to media.