DVD disks are still commonly used in some areas while the disks are not fast and convenient enough for frequent usage. For frequent usage or archiving, an image of the DVD on hard drives will be better. ISO images do not use a particular container format. They are just a sector-by-sector copy of the data on an optical disc to a binary file. On Linux, dd does this job very well. This post will introduce how to make an ISO image from a DVD disk on Linux and how to mount/unmount it.

How to create an ISO image

The command to create the ISO image is as follows.

# dd if=/dev/sr0 of=/path/to/store/image.iso bs=8192

or

# dd if=/dev/cdrom of=/path/to/store/image.iso bs=8192

depending on your Linux environment. The ‘/dev/cdrom’ is a symbolic link to ‘/dev/sr0’ on my system during test (Fedora 22).

That’s it, very easy and fast.

How to mount the ISO image

Later, if you want to check files in the ISO image, you can mount it on Linux by

# mount -o loop /path/to/store/image.iso /mount/point

Then, the ISO is mounted to ‘/mnt/point’ if everything goes well. You can unmount it by the usual umount /mount/point command.