Downloading ISO images and Creating Bootable CDs

Using RedHat 7.3 as example...

Downloading to Windows and using Windows to burn bootable CD

1. Requirements

• You will need a little less than 2GB of free space for the binary RPS alone
• Create enough space to download the ISO images
• You will need 3 blank CD-Rs.

2. Download ISO images from RedHat

• ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/7.3/en/iso/i386/
• Note that this web site is very busy, using a mirror site may improve your download performance
• You will find RPM images and source RPMs (SRPMs contain the source code)
• Grab the 3 RPM images:
• valhalla-i386-disc1.iso
• valhalla-i386-disc2.iso
• valhalla-i386-disc3.iso

3. Download the file MD5SUM which contains the md5sum info for each ISO

This file is located in the same directory as the ISOs

There is a copy at the bottom of this document

4. Check the md5sum on the images

• Why? To make sure you do not have a corrupt file
• For Windows download either the 16 or 32 bit version of md5sum.exe from the Internet
http://www.e-smith.org/docs/howto/CD_burning_howto.php3

• Run md5sum.exe on each ISOs from your Windows machine.
• Bring up a cmd window
• change to the directory where you downloaded md5sum.exe

md5sum.exe full_path\valhalla-i386-disc1.iso
OR
 
• Use Samba to mount your Windows directory on your Linux machine and run md5sum on the mounted ISO images

5. Use your CD writer software to put the ISO images onto three CD-Rs

• Using Roxio (Adaptec) version 4 or 5
• choose Easy CD Creator under File menu,
• select "Record CD from CD Image" or "Create CD From Disk Image" depending on your version.
• It will bring up a browse dialog,
• select ISO under File Type and browse to the location of your 3 ISO images.
• Select the ISO image and click OK. Repeat this for all three ISO images.

Congratulations, you have just created a bootable CD!

1. Follow steps 1 through 4 for Windows download

2. Write the ISO images onto three CD-Rs

• Use X-CD Roast from GNOME or KDE (Programs -> Multimedia)

OR

• Use the command cdrecord
• First find out the device address of your CD-R(W) device

# cdrecord -scanbus
 
• Now record to a blank CD-R using that address with "dev="

# cdrecord -v -eject speed=4 dev=0,3,0 valhalla-i386-disc1.iso
 
• Repeat for all your ISOs.

• If you don't have a bootable CDROM or you wish to install/upgrade directly from the downloaded disk images (ISOs) without making a CD
• Save the ISOs to disk on your Linux machine
• create a bootable floopy
• tell the install program where to find the ISOs on your hard disk during the install process

• If you have already saved the ISO images to disk you can mount these image and copy files from them
• You will need to do this to access the boot image in order to create a bootable diskette

# mount -o loop -t iso9660 <isofilename> <mountpoint>

• Here is a typical example

# mkdir /mnt/cdimage
# mount -o loop -t iso9660 valhalla-SRPMS-disc1.iso /mnt/cdimage
 
• Now you can change directory to /mnt/cdimage/images to access the boot.img file in order to write it to the floppy diskette (see below)

If you have copied the ISO successfully to CDROM

# mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom
# dd if=/mnt/cdrom/images/boot.img of=/dev/fd0 bs=1440k
# umount /mnt/cdrom
 
• If you have saved the ISO images to disk and mounted the first image as per above

# dd if=/mnt/cdimage/images/boot.img of=/dev/fd0 bs=1440k
 
• Now unmount the ISO image

# umount /mnt/cdimage

• Use the rawrite command which can be found on the CD you just created
• Bring up a cmd window
• Here I am assuming that the CD is mapped to drive D on your Window machine

D:
dosutils\rawrite
 
• Next rawrite will prompt you for the location of the image source file. You need to enter the full path

D:\images\boot.img

• You will be prompted for the target diskette drive (typically A:)

• You will be asked to insert a formatted diskette into drive A:, after inserting a formatted floppy in the drive, hit the Enter key and the copying will commence.

c9a4d963a49e384e10dec9c2bd49ad73 valhalla-SRPMS-disc1.iso
41b03d068e84d2a17147aa27e704f79b valhalla-SRPMS-disc2.iso
cb91810ce8173039fed24420407e4c59 valhalla-i386-disc1.iso
ec1b813d32ffdc8edc2be261735d17de valhalla-i386-disc2.iso
5dc81ce523cfddf99b4d4d63e91bcaa7 valhalla-i386-disc3.iso

RedHat web site for additional install information: http://www.redhat.com/download/howto_download.html
An excellent page for ISO information: http://www.e-smith.org/docs/howto/CD_burning_howto.php3