CD ISOs to DVD

Jongi · 08-31-2005, 02:15 PM

I have CD ISOs for various Linux distros. Is it possible, for instance, to take Mandriva ISOs and burn them onto a CD so that I install from a single DVD instead of however many CDs I would have to create from the ISOs?

ichi · 08-31-2005, 05:52 PM

It is probably possible...but not easily. You'd have to extract the contents of the ISO and merge them or something...it certainly wouldn't be as simple as burning two ISOs to a DVD and it just working.

I'm not saying for sure, but I really don't think so.

jschiwal · 08-31-2005, 06:29 PM

For Mandrake at least, you can install from a directory. This installation method expects the directory to contain the ISO images of the CDs. So if the Mandrake ISO images are on a DVD, a mounted DVD drive could function as the directory. You will need to create the correct boot floppy.
However, I don't know if you can press CTRL-Alt-F2 at this point to mount the DVD disk. Also, if you currently need to boot up with a CD burned with the boot.iso image to do this, then you may have the drive occupied.

If possible, it may make more sense downloading a DVD installation disk image rather than the CD images.

Jongi · 09-02-2005, 02:47 AM

I have tried something out. And I now want to create a bootable iso using Nero. There's the part on Nero that wants an image. What do I do at this point?

Jongi · 09-02-2005, 03:34 AM

I tried out this process for the SuSE 9.3 ISOs I have. Except that I didn't use UltraISO. Instead I did the process by copying all the files to a directory on my hard drive. Would that be my downfall? Would I somehow need to extract the boot image from the 1st ISO?

jschiwal · 09-09-2005, 11:30 PM

If you don't need to re-use this harddrive partition during the install, and if you have a boot image designed to install from stored images, then you will do fine. However the README files that you should read, and the boot image you want to use may reside on the image of the first CD. You may need to either burn the first ISO image to disk, or mount it using a loopback device to access them.

I've seen this for Mandrake, however I don't know if SuSE will install this way. You will need to do some exploring on the first CD rom image to find out for sure.