Having created a DVD with all of the contents of the
4 Slackware 10.2 ISO's, I erroneously thought I could
use this as an install DVD. Of course, it would not
boot when I tried it but it serves as a good source to
create an ISO with mkisofs.

I tried to read up a little bit on how CD's are made
bootable with the 'El Torito' standard but it is
unclear to me just how this works.

It seems that it is necessary to create a boot.img and a
catalog file located somewhere on the CD/DVD with a pointer
somewhere in the filesystem header. I don't know where these
files are located or if they are visible, but I do not see
these files anywhere on the install disk I burned from the
d1 ISO. I assume mkisofs does this all automatically.

Rather than going through the entire mkisofs procedure,
would it be possible to create a boot.img file that I could
simply copy onto my existing DVD to make it bootable?

Try this http://boncey.org/2004_12_23_make_yo...0_bootable_dvd
This should get you going. Good luck. Had another tutorial but lost link.

So the answer is no?

Wouldn't it work if you created one large iso and burn it into dvd selecting bootable mode (maybe I am too much used to nero). k3b should also be capable of it. I remember creating Solaris dvd this way.

Yes Alien, and that's what I tried to do. However I am
having a little problem with mkisofs.

I exploded each slackware ISO with Undisker and combined
them into a single install directory on my Win2k HD. I then
copied that directory, via drag/drop, to a DVD preformatted
using InCD.

After some time and in order to use mkiosfs, I copied the entire
DVD contents to an install directory on the HD. This has always
been my setup for creating ISO's with mkisofs.

However, this time I have run into an unusual error:

C:\>mkisofs -o /temp/slackware.iso -R -J -V "Slackware Install" -hide-rr-moved -v
-d -N -no-emul-boot -boot-loadsize 32 -boot-info-table -sort isolinux/iso.sort
-b isolinux/isolinux.bin -c isolinux/isolinux.boot -A "Slackware Install CD" .
Warning: creating filesystem that does not conform to ISO-9660.
mkisofs 1.15a12 (i586-pc-cygwin)
mkisofs: No such file or directory. Invalid node - 32

The last line is referring to the parent directory "." and it
should be looking something like:

Scanning .
Scanning ./slackware

The install directory is \ops and contains the batch file
'iso.cmd' which is giving rise to the error output.

This has never been a problem before and I can only think that
the data written to the DVD is somehow corrupted when I copy
it to the HD. The DVD does contain that horrid 'Non-allocatable
Space' file which cannot be written to the HD and may be the
corrupting factor.


Any suggestions?

P. S. Just to see if it was a Win2K problem, I transferred the
directory to Slack 10.2 system and ran mkisofs there:

mkisofs: No such file or directory. Can't open sort file list
isolinux/iso.sort

There doesn't appear to be anything wrong with the file.

Whatever the problem is, I simply removed:

-sort isolinux/iso.sort

from the mksiofs options and then it created the ISO.

There doesn't seem to be any ill effects as I used the
DVD today to install Linux on another machine. It went
smoothly.