Create An ISO From A DVD or CD

Sometime ago I created a slideshow video from a collection of wedding photos for a friendly couple. I made DVD video with nice background music out of it and gave it to them as an anniversary gift. I used xsane/Imagination/mencoder/avidemux-qt/devede/K3B to accomplish this – all of which are available in PCLinuxOS repositories, just in case you wondered. I wanted to keep a backup of this DVD on my HDD in a ISO file format, just in case they asked for another copy. How would I create ISO file from a CD/DVD media? Its VERY simple. Use the dd command. This is how it’s done:

Assuming that:

A) Your system identifies the CD/DVD drive as /dev/sr0.

B) Your destination folder is based in your home folder.

C) The filename you want to use is file.iso.

Open a terminal and issue this command, followed by [ENTER] key:

dd if=/dev/sr0 of=~/file.iso

Where:

if=/dev/sr0 means read from /dev/sr0 (raw format)

of=~/file.iso means copy the media to a file named file.iso located in your /home/user/ folder i.e. backup media to ISO image.

Now you can, for example:

A) Burn the ISO to a CD/DVD to make extra copies, using K3B/Brasero/SimpleBurn, or any other optical disc writing application.

B) If it’s, let’s say a Linux LiveCD, you can use ISO to boot it in VirtualBox (also available in PCLinuxOS repositories).

C) Do many other things with it.