Guide: Burning ISO Images to a CD/DVD-RW - Overclock.net

Metal425 · 01-21-08

First off I would like to say thanks to my friend Life, for helping me write this guide. He has already posted it on another site so I thought I would share it with you guys!

This guide is designed for using NERO, if you want to use a different program go ahead and do so. I also like to use Imgburn, which is a free ISO burning program which can be downloaded here. http://www.imgburn.com/

On to the Guide---

Ok, so you have downloaded your chosen distribution ISO image, and are wondering; "what next?".

Well this depends on what Operating System you are using. The following aims at giving new users a basic guide to burning an ISO image to CD, under Windows and Linux.

Obviously in either case, you will need access to a CD burner, and a blank CD disc. Bare in mind some distributions are over 650MB, so you should probably purchase 700MB CD discs, rather than 650MB.

I have seen a couple of instances in the past, where an ISO image for a distribution has edged slightly over 700MB, and thus wouldn't fit onto a normal 700MB CD, in this case, you may still be able to burn the image using a feature known as "overburning", which is supported by most burning software, although not all burning hardware. You should check you vendor / manufacturer's website to see if your drive supports this feature before attempting it. For older drives that do not support overburning, there are cases where a firmware upgrade can enable it, but this is beyond the scope of this guide.

Just a side note here really; If you are going to burn a Linux distribution ISO, its generally good practice to use a CD-RW, rather than a CD-R, as distributions often update pretty quickly (with a couple of exceptions), and you may find the ISO image you have burned to CD grows out of date pretty fast, so instead of wasting another CD-R, you can simply use a CD-RW, format it and burn the updated ISO image when required.

Burning ISO Images Under Windows:

For the Windows section of this guide, we will focus on using an application called Nero, from Ahead. This CD/DVD burning software is about the best around for Windows in most peoples opinion, and is generally very easy to use.

You can download a free trial edition of Nero Burning ROM from: http://www.nero.com/en/index.html

After you have installed Nero, burning an ISO image is simple:

Insert a blank CD into your CD burner
Start Nero Burning ROM
Close the Wizard dialouge box that appears at startup
Select "File", and then "Burn Image"
Change directory to the location of your downloaded ISO image, and then select the ISO file (should be something like slackware-10.0-disc1.iso)
Click "OK"
Ensure that the "Simulate" box is unchecked.
Click "Write"

This should now start performing a check on the drive and the blank disc, and proceed to burning your ISO image to the blank CD. Once it has completed, leave the CD in the drive, and reboot your system. Hopefully, your system should go through POST and boot up from the CD you have just burned, into the distributions installation / startup menu.

If this is not the case, it is likely your BIOS is set not to boot from CD-ROM. I cannot really go into detail how to change this, as it varies from BIOS to BIOS, but generally, at startup you must hit a key such as F8, F11 or DEL (it should say how when the system first starts up). Once you have entered the BIOS, you need to look for an option such as "Boot Sequence" or "First Boot Device", and change it to boot from CDROM before it tries to boot from the hard drive. Save settings and exit. If you reboot and it still doesn't boot from the CD, either the CD hasn't been burned correctly, is corrupted, or there is a problem with the ISO image you downloaded, you should check the MD5 sum provided by the vendor to see if it matches the ISO image you have.

Note: There are many other decent burning applications around for Windows, Alcohol120% is among the best of the rest, but Nero is also a very popular tool, and there is no need to list all the alternatives with guides on their use.

Burning ISO Images Under Linux:

Things can be slightly more complicated when burning an ISO under Linux, but as long as your CDRW / DVDRW drive is setup and the kernel can "see" it, you shouldn't have too much trouble. Incidentally, as the Linux kernel used to have to use a SCSI driver to interact with ATAPI / IDE devices like CD-ROM drives, you may need to append your boot sequence to enable the newer 2.6 kernels to use the new IDE-CD driver (providing the kernel was compiled with the ide-cd module). With Lilo you can do this by opening up lilo.conf (usually at /etc/lilo.conf) and adding the line:

append = "hdc=ide-cd"

At the top before the sections for your kernel images, so the beginning of your lilo.conf looks similar to this:

boot = /dev/hda
message = /boot/boot_message.txt
prompt
timeout = 600
append = "hdd=ide-cd"

If you use Grub as your bootloader instead of lilo, you can enable the ide-cd driver at boot time by adding the following into menu.lst on your kernel line which is usually at /boot/grub/menu.lst:

hdc=ide-cd

(This is all assuming your CDRW drive is designated as /dev/hdc, if you are unsure, check /etc/fstab, and see if this is correct, in reality it may be /dev/hdd, /dev/hde or even be a SCSI device anyway).

Moving onwards, for this section of the guide, we will look at using k3b, a very good front end GUI for cdrecord. Gcombust is also a decent frontend which you could use instead, should you have problems with k3b, or simply not like it. You can of course use tools like cdrecord from the command line, but as this guide is really aimed at beginners, we should probably stick to using the frontends. (there is always cdrecord -help if you are feeling adventurous )

You can download k3b from http://www.k3b.org, and gcombust from http://www.abo.fi/~jmunsin/gcombust/ . As these applications are just frontend GUI's, you will also need to make sure you have JÃƒÆ’Ã‚Â¶rg Schilling's cdrtools / cdrecord installed on your system, almost every mainstream distribution out there includes cdrtools, so you should have it installed by default. If you don't, you can download the binaries from your distribution vendor, favourite mirror site, or from JÃƒÆ’Ã‚Â¶rg's site at:

http://www.fokus.gmd.de/research/cc/.../cdrecord.html

Once you have compiled / installed k3b, launch the program from your X desktop environment (e.g. KDE, Gnome, Flux etc) menu, or by issuing the command "k3b" (without the ""'s, and as root) from a terminal.

Before you start burning, you may first need to select "Settings" and then "K3b Setup", to change permissions of certain files on your hard drive it requires to function. You may also need to point k3b to your CD burner, by going to "Settings" and then "Configure K3b".

Hopefully, k3b should detect your CDRW drive, and set it up accordingly, if however it cannot see it, you may need to add the device manually. Again, take a look at your /etc/fstab, and see what designation the drive has been given, usually it is /dev/hdc, so you can select "Add Device" from the "Configure K3b" menu, and point it to /dev/hdc.

Now, after making sure you have a blank CD in the CDRW drive, select "Tools" > "CD" > "Burn CD Image". Select the image you wish to burn from the dialouge, and simply click "Start". You can usually let K3b use "auto" settings for image type, writing modes and speed, as it will determine them automatically, for reference its usually best to use DAO (Disk-At-Once) as the writing mode for an ISO image, the speed is dependant on the drive and CD's capabilities, a minimum of 8x should work fine in 99% of cases, and obviously you will want to select image type as "ISO9660".

Reboot, and enjoy. If your system fails to boot from the CD, see the end of the Windows section above for the likely reason / soloution.

DVD Burning:

As DVDRW hardware is becoming more widespread, and some distributions are now serving multiple CD's as a DVD image, you may find yourself wanting to burn your ISO image to a DVD instead. Under both Nero for Windows, and k3b for Linux, this is a simple matter of choosing the option in the menus of each client (for instance, in k3b, its simply a matter of selecting "Tools > DVD > Burn DVD Image", rather than selecting the "CD" option. However, cdrecord doesn't natively support DVD burning, so if you choose not to use a frontend like k3b, you will need to read the releveant manuals for applications like dvd+rwtools, growisofs, or use the cdrecord dvdhack. Also, DVD burning isn't supported brilliantly under Linux for some hardware (particularly first generation drives), and you may find yourself having to play around a bit and possibly updating the drives firmware. I may add this information into the guide at a later date.

Any problems or comments, feel free to post here.

Semper Fidelis · 01-21-08

I use ActiveISO.. much smaller program that JUST burns .iso files... but good guide though

itslogz · 01-21-08

Good guide. I just use Nero 8 or Power ISO, but still a good read for those who's never done it

ElMikeTheMike · 01-21-08

More users should do things like this. Nice work.

Rep +

nate911 · 01-21-08

Nice guide!

itslogz · 01-21-08

Quote:

Originally Posted by ElMikeTheMike

More users should do things like this. Nice work.

Rep +

Ive been working on a long ass guide to speeding up every aspect of windows XP, doing a little each day its gonna take awhile though but itll be a good read