6. At last: burning the CD

As we assume that you have a working CD-writer on your system, and you know how to use it, we wont go into much detail about burning the CD. If you are burning your CD on a Linux system, you can install the excellent XCDroast package. In XCDRoast, switch on the Rock Ridge extensions, and the creation of a TRANS.TBL file.

Make sure the top directory of the CD contains at least the following files and directories:

 
COPYING      RPM-PGP-KEY README       RedHat/

The following directories might come in handy:

 
doc/         gnome/      misc/        dosutils/    images/

6.1 Creating a bootable CD

Since XCDroast doesn't support creation of bootable disks you'll need to use other tools, for example mkisofs ( RPMs). and cdrecord. ( RPMs). You'll need to create an image file which will be written to the CD. This file will be 500Mb or more so find a partition with enough free space and change the path for redhat.img in the following commands if necessary. You may need to be root to use mount and cdrecord.

Create iso9660 disk image

Change directory to the place in your mirror that will be the root directory of the cd. For instance, redhat-6.1/i386.

 
mkisofs -v -r -T -J -V "Red Hat 6.1" -b images/boot.img -c boot.catalog -o /tmp/redhat.img . 

The file ${RHROOT}/boot.catalog will be created by mkisofs.

Some versions of mkisofs do not have a -J option. It can be omitted since the Joliet extensions it specifies are not used by the installer although they make the CD more readable in Windows.

Test the image

If you're paranoid you can test your new disk image by mounting it. If you forgot to fix the file permissions or set the rock ridge extensions then the error will be obvious here since the file names and directory structure will be wrong.

 
mount -t iso9660 -o ro,loop=/dev/loop0 /tmp/redhat.img /mnt/cdrom

When you're done, don't forget to unmount it.

 
umount /mnt/cdrom 

Burn the disk

Be sure to set the correct speed for your device. This command is for a 4X CDR. You may have a 1X or 2X drive.

 
cdrecord -v speed=4 dev=0,3 /tmp/redhat.img 

In the above command, it is assumed that the CD writer is on SCSI bus 0, with ID number 3.