<!doctype html public "-//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en"> <html> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> <meta name="Author" content="vanco"> <meta name="GENERATOR" content="Mozilla/4.77 [en] (Windows NT 5.0; U) [Netscape]"> <title>Making a RH Install DVD from CD ISOs</title> </head> <body text="#000000" bgcolor="#FFFF99" link="#0000EE" vlink="#3333FF" alink="#FF0000"> <a href="../../../modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=index&catid=1">How To's</a>: <a href="../../../displayarticle7.html" class="pn-title">How to make your own RedHat 8.0 DVD from the CD ISO images</a> Red Hat has finally created a DVD version of their distribution for US consumers. (They've had one in Europe for a while, I understand.) For 8.0, though, it seems that you have to buy RedHat 8.0 Professional to get the DVD, and RedHat is not presently offering an ISO image of the DVD for download. After reading some of the anaconda source code, I have figured out how you can make your own DVD from the CD ISO images. I've done this, written it to a DVD+RW disc, had it pass its Media check, and successfully installed from it. The idea is simple, which is a testament to the flexibility of Red Hat's installation system. There's a file on the root of each CD called .discinfo that contains information including which discs' contents are represented. The CDs each contain only a single number here, but the installation software will accept a comma-separated list of numbers. The sequence of commands below will create an ISO image that consists of the combined contents of the five discs + the documentation disc (in a docs subdirectory) and is bootable and suitable for being installed from. If you don't care about docs, omit the docs/=Psyche-docs argument, and don't bother with the docs ISO. If you don't care about sources, omit the SRPMS/= arguments and dispense with discs 4 and 5. These instructions require you to have enough disk space for the resulting ISO image, but if you have a DVD burner and don't care about installing the media checksum so that you can test the media from install (not really that important if you have verified the checksums of the original images, unless you're concerned about errors resulting from the actual DVD creation process itself), you can pipe the output of mkisofs directly to your burning software and not worry about the intermediate disk space. So here are the steps. These steps create a DVD image that is usable from a Unix system. Add the -J and -T flags to the mkisofs command if you want something that you can read from Windows as well. Add -V "Label" if you want to create a volume label. 1. Go to a place on your drive with about 3.5 GB free. This is needed for the final ISO image only. You'll need a 2.4 kernel to create a file > 2 GB. If you're running Red Hat, This works on a 7.1 system or newer. 2. Create directories on which to mount the ISO images using loop device mounts: mkdir Psyche-i386-disc{1,2,3,4,5} Psyche-docs 3. Mount the ISO images using a loop device mount: mount -o ro,loop .../Psyche-i386-disc1.iso Psyche-i386-disc1 mount -o ro,loop .../Psyche-i386-disc2.iso Psyche-i386-disc2 # etc. -- repeat for the remaining discs that you want # Replace ... with the path to your ISO images. 4. Copy the isolinux directory and the .discinfo from disc1 to the current directory: cp -a Psyche-i386-disc1/isolinux Psyche-i386-disc1/.discinfo