custom boot.iso (was: CD burning software)

[James Olin Oden]

On Tue, 2 Dec 2003, stephan schutter wrote:

> I got that far (but was trying to do it with XCD roast .. or what ever 
> it is called). But I am not sure of what options to use... I found that 
> is is not floppy or hard drive emulation...
>
You really want to do this with mkisofs so you can then script it easily.
I do something like the following:

	mkisofs -r -J -T \
		-b isolinux/isolinux.bin \
		-no-emul-boot \
		-boot-load-size 4 \
		-boot-info-table \
                -o "${ISO_IMAGE}" \
                -V "${CD_LABEL}" \
                "${RH_BUILD_DIR}" 

You of course need to substitute reasonable values for the variables.
I don't remember all the reasons for each switch, but the mkisofs man
page does describe each one.  The brief explanatioin is you need to
make it an "El Torrito" format bootable CDROM, which essentially is
an ISO marked such that when an Intel like BIOS sees the cdrom it will
find a pointer to the location of a "floppy" image (could be a hard
drive image, but I have never seen this done with linux installers).
Ultimately that is what the "-b isolinux/isolinux.bin" stuff is for.
The next three options have something to do with the way isolinux
likes things as opposed to syslinux did but I don't know the details.
Everything else is just standard stuff you feed to mkisofs.

Cheers...james