help mounting and installing from an ISO file
 

Can someone please give me detailed instructions on how to mount a 2.6 GB, FC4-i386-DVD.iso file so that the desktop's "Add/Remove Applications" applet interacts with the iso and not with the cdrom (because it asks for install media of which unfortunately I have only corrupted copies). Simply creating a "dev/cdrom" folder and mounting the iso in it, and then running the autorun file from it doesn't work --- it looks like it's working, but applications don't get installed and the desktop's "Add/Remove Applications" applet doesn't show changes made by the former method.
I would like to do a complete re-install but I'm guessing that isn't possible when the ISO file is located on the same HDD upon which I would like to do the installing --- is this correct?

You can mount the file to your normal DVD mount point using
#mount -o loop -t iso9660 <isofilename> <mountpoint>
I have not tested it. But it shoul work.

You will have to check the file system type. If it is not right then it will not complete the mount. DVD are usually udf file system.
mount -o loop -t udf <isofilename> <mountpoint>
Sorry I missed this point.

Thanks for the reply. the"-t udf" option gets an "invalid file system" err msg.
After some research and experimentation,
"mount -o loop -t iso9660 FC4-i386-DVD.iso /mnt/cdrom"
will appear to work, but stuff doesn't get installed, and the "Add/Remove Applications" applet is unaware of any changes supposedly made using it. Furthermore, it only works when the autorun file is run from the folder in which it was mounted, not the desktop's "Add/Remove Applications" applet.
Should I (temporarily) remove all references to cdrom, and cdwriter in the /dev folder first? That's where the symlink files are currently located.

Re: help mounting and installing from an ISO file
 

Normally, installing software from a mounted ISO should not be a problem... certainly I've installed both Linux and Windows software from mounted ISOs and not had any such problem (but then again, I'm not using FC).

However, there are a few things I don't understand about your situation:

1) You have an ISO.... I assume that this is the same DVD that you only have corrupted copies of. Why don't you just burn the ISO and use the new DVD to replace the corrupted one?

2) If the answer to 1) is that the ISO file you have was created from the original (now corrupted) media, then how do you know the ISO file is not also corrupt and that is the source of your problems?

3) If the answer to 1) is that this is a different ISO file than what your system is (you're acutally using FC3, and this is an FC4 DVD)-- well, just don't do that.

4) This "Add/Remove Applications applet" seems to be kind of a problem... do you have an alternative to it (like using RPM directly, or apt-get, or Synaptic or Yum, one of which this applet is probably a front-end for)? The answer to your actual question is most likely that whatever package manager this applet is actually using needs to be configured to see the mount point of your ISO. Ah. A quick Google Linux search takes me to the Fedora documentation on updating your software sources, which reveals not only that you're using Yum, but also how to configure it.

So that should tell you how to add sufficient sources to either include the ISO mount, or make it obsolete, by adding external sources from the Internet, so that neither the corrupted media nor the ISO mount is strictly necessary to install whatever you're trying to install.

Hope this helps.

I re-read my post and I agree it would seem confusing. I have a cd burner that can't do DVDs. I started with the 4 CD ISOs (using win XP) that I verified with the secure hash algorithm on my HDD but when I burned them and tried to install with them, the installer failed disc1. So I re-burned it --- same thing. I ended up burning 5 or so CDs and was running out of CDs, so I went ahead and installed with the bad media hoping that the corruption was located in a non-critical file and thinking I could dnload and reinstall with a basicly functioning linux installation. The install seemed to work but there was the problem with the installer not working properly and some other things so, using Linux FC4 now, I dnloaded the single, 2.7GB DVD file to the HDD hoping I could reinstall everything from it --- this was what the situation was when I wrote the post ---this should explain the apparent contradictions. I was in a hurry but I guess I should have spelled it all out more clearly.
What I did in the end was find an FC4 CD burning application that could verify post-burn integrity and read up on these drives and discovered there was a trade-off between write-speed and writing effectiveness. Then I re-dnloaded (with linux now) the 4 CD ISOs, verified them with SHA1SUM, set the burn-speed to that of molasses, turned on the 'Verify After Burning" option and re-burned all 4 discs. Only one failed the post-burn verification at the decreased write-speed. Then I re-formatted and cleanly re-installed the whole shebang, and now it's all good in da hood.
Thanks for the response --- issue resolved.

Related Question
 

You have done 3 very good/polite things here:[list=1][*]Added pertinent info.[*]Expressed your thanks.[*]Told us that the problem is solved.[/list=1]
Thanks.

Now on to a related question.

I have been wanting to do installs directly from an ISO w/o having to burn the actual disc. Specifically, it is time for me to install SimplyMEPIS 3.3.1-1. I will d/l the image to a separate date partition, and hope to use the existing 3.3 installation to do the mount etc.
Presumably the mount command would look like this: where <filetype> = 'iso9660'. I would then do the install to a 3rd separate partition & adjust my master GRUB menu.lst accordingly. I have done enough multi-boot installs that I am not worried about that aspect of it.

What I am concerned about is if this technique will work w/ the ISO of a bootable CD.

Has anybody done this before? Any pointers?