How to make bootable copies of distro CD's
 

I am running Suse 9.3 with kde
I have K3b cd burner program
I want to give copies of distros away to others as part of getting more users on linux
I have bought disk set for a whole lot of different distros
I got a one cd distro called Caldira
I have tried over and over to copy this disk
I get all the files on the disk and have actually compared the disks directories and they are identical
the origional Cladira disk BOOTS into an install program but when I try to boot to my "copy" the computer after a while says "place bootable media in drive"

An easy way is to make an image file from your cdrom

dd if=/dev/cdrom of=/tmp/cdrom.iso bs=512

(if /dev/cdrom is the one that is the one you use to mount, but don't mount it for this) But you will need to be root for this in most cases.

let it run till it stops with an read error.
this iso file you can burn again, this will be a copy at this
level.

The other way depends a bit how the files are organised on the cds of your distribution.

Best regards,

Tlowk

Thanks quick respons Tlowk
I am a newbie and have done nothing to date with command line stuff
I am quiet looking forward to it
I would thus end up with a file called cdrom.iso in the TMP file ??
what does the bis=512 mean ?
To get K3b to burn it I could go into K3b in graphical interface and point it to that file
But what command sequence would you give at command line to do the burn ??

I think about this one:
cdrecord dev=/dev/cdrom -eject -v /tmp/cdrom.iso

I specify the device in a file /etc/default/cdrecord
CDR_DEVICE=/dev/cdrom
CDR_SPEED=

this saves you of specifying it on the command line

you could point k3b to this file as a image also I think, I've got to admin I never use it, since I'm used to command line tools and they give me a lot more freedom to even use a computer via a slow connection. and moreover scripts are easy.

regards

Tlowk