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Creating a Red Hat DVD from .iso images
by Jay Berkenbilt
Note: I just want to give a very special thanks to
Jay Berkenbilt who was the original author of this document and has very
graciously given me permission to use it. Thanks, Jay!
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.
- 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.
- Create directories on which to mount the ISO images using loop device mounts:
mkdir Psyche-i386-disc{1,2,3,4,5} Psyche-docs
- 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.
- Copy the isolinux directory and the .discinfo from disc1 to the current
directory:
cp -a Psyche-i386-disc1/isolinux Psyche-i386-disc1/.discinfo .
- Edit the .discinfo file, replacing the fourth line with 1,2,3,4,5 if you
are creating an image with all five discs or with 1,2,3 if you are just using
the three install discs.
- Create the iso image. I'm separating this mkisofs command into
multiple lines ending with \ for clarity. You can type it that way or as a
long command. I explain this command at the end.
mkisofs -o Psyche-i386-dvd.iso \
-b isolinux/isolinux.bin -c isolinux/boot.cat \
-no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table \
-R -m TRANS.TBL \
-x Psyche-i386-disc1/.discinfo -x Psyche-i386-disc1/isolinux \
-graft-points Psyche-i386-disc1 .discinfo=.discinfo isolinux/=isolinux \
RedHat/=Psyche-i386-disc2/RedHat RedHat/=Psyche-i386-disc3/RedHat \
SRPMS/=Psyche-i386-disc3/SRPMS SRPMS/=Psyche-i386-disc4/SRPMS \
SRPMS/=Psyche-i386-disc5/SRPMS docs/=Psyche-docs
- (Optional) If you want to create a media checksum for the installation
software to look at when you do a media test during install, then following
these additional steps:
- Install the anaconda source rpm located on disc5 and cd /usr/src/redhat
- Comment out the BuildPreReq line in SPECS/anaconda.spec
- Run rpmbuild -bp SPECS/anaconda.spec
- Go to BUILD/anaconda-8.0/isomd5sum
- Run "make"
- Run ./implantisomd5 .../Psyche-i386-dvd.iso (where ... is
replaced with the path to your new ISO image). This step
will take several minutes and not provide any feedback while
it runs.
Now burn the resulting ISO image to a DVD.
Here's the mkisofs command explained:
# Write the output to Psyche-i386-dvd.iso
mkisofs -o Psyche-i386-dvd.iso \
# Set up the DVD to be bootable using an El Torito boot image.
# This comes from the RELEASE_NOTES file on disc 1.
-b isolinux/isolinux.bin -c isolinux/boot.cat \
-no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table \
# Use Rock ridge extensions (to support long file names, etc.).
# Exclude all TRANS.TBL files on the original disc. If you want
# to access this disc from Windows, add -J to create Joliet
# extensions and -T to create new TRANS.TBL files in place of
# the ones you're omitting.
-R -m TRANS.TBL \
# Omit the .discinfo and isolinux files from disc1
-x Psyche-i386-disc1/.discinfo -x Psyche-i386-disc1/isolinux \
# Use Psyche-i386-disc1 (minus above exclusions) as the root.
# Graft the .discinfo and isolinux directories from the current
# directory to .discinfo and isolinux on the new disc. Also
# graft in the RedHat and SRPMS directories from the remaining
# discs. Include the entire contents of the docs disc in the
# docs subdirectory.
-graft-points Psyche-i386-disc1 .discinfo=.discinfo isolinux/=isolinux \
RedHat/=Psyche-i386-disc2/RedHat RedHat/=Psyche-i386-disc3/RedHat \
SRPMS/=Psyche-i386-disc3/SRPMS SRPMS/=Psyche-i386-disc4/SRPMS \
SRPMS/=Psyche-i386-disc5/SRPMS docs/=Psyche-docs
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