I have several educational CDs from my grandson that I wish to back up to
.iso files. Using Linux Mint 7 KDE version.
Have tried dd several times with no success.
Results listed here:
~/Pimsleur $ sudo dd if=/dev/cdrom of=Pimsleur1n2.iso
dd: reading `/dev/cdrom': Input/output error
0+0 records in
0+0 records out
0 bytes (0 B) copied, 0.00975827 s, 0.0 kB/s
franka@frankhome ~/Pimsleur $

Any suggestions or help greatly appreciated.

Actually, if you put the cd into the cd tray
and insert it while running Mint
it should open a file manager?

if it doesn't, open file manager
and find cdrom in side panel
left click or right clcik and choose "mount"

a disc icon should show up on your desktop
right click that and select "copy"
or similar and then "paste" it into a empty folder
somewhere

in terminal, after mounting cdrom
you could also use CP command to copy disc to iso
assuming cdrom is mounted on /media/sr0

to find out where cdrom is mounted enter

in terminal

You need to unmount the cd, before using dd
Find out where the cd is mounted with
and then unmount it

The problem seems to be that I do not know where the CD is located
in Mint. Am using a Dell Dimension with both a DVD and CD.
When I tried tdo unmount dthe cd with: umount /dev/cdrom
I get the following: umount: /dev/sr1 is not mounted (according to mtab)
I am fairly new to Linux and have little experience with dd and optical
drives.

The other drive may be /dev/sr0 but to be sure, as mentioned above, just type `mount` all by itself to see what's mounted where.

Sasha

Turns out that the drive was /dev/sr1
But dd nor cp would copy it.
K3b will copy or rip it however but rips it as an oog file.
And what I wanted was an iso file.
Thanks much to everyone for their input.

Some things to check:

• what kind of cd is it? multisession? audiocd? mixed mode? Only data cdroms can be saved to an ISO file. Audio cds do not have an iso9660 fs, hence you can't save an ISO image. Multisession cds and cd extra formats have many sessions. Each data session can be saved to an ISO (though you will need some extra magic to get any session but the last one). If there are audio tracks, these can't be saved as ISO. For audio disks, you need to rip the audio.
• As usual, double check it's the right drive.
• Having it mounted doesn't make a difference, since it's mounted read-only anyway.

Since k3b is ripping an "oog" (did you mean "ogg"?) file, I am inclined to think that that cd is not a data cdrom. That's the first thing you should be checking right now.

Indeed. The oog was probably a typo.
And it is pretty much an ausio CD.
Now I know my error. Thank you very much.
Problem solved.

Try to download K3B.
Then you go to a tab that mean make a cd image.
There you can copy the files from the disks to make a cd image.

You can't make an iso of a cdaudio disk. Some programs will pretend so, and save the image in an exotic format, which doesn't make it true (those images are not ISO9660 compliant at all).

It's just like saving the cdaudio to a flac+cue image indeed, but it's not ISO.