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archive old distros


Trio3b
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Most of us download an iso of a distro onto HD and then burn to a bootable disc which we use to install the OS onto another / different HD.

 

I want to go in reverse. Take a distro already burned to CD and either put it back into an iso file or archive it somehow onto a spare HD.

 

Why?

 

1. Running out of room in my shop and want to toss out / donate many of the older distros on CD that I don't use anymore but MIGHT want to tinker with someday.

2. Because some of the older release versions that I have on CD are either not available / hidden /difficult to find and some of these older unavailable release versions are actually better than some new releases.

3. Also, because I did much of my d/l onto a little 20g HD and had to delete the iso for space sake, but now I have access to much larger HD

 

Is this doable ?

 

Can the process of burning an iso file to disc be reversed?

 

Does this work for a LiveCD?

 

Curious.

 

Thanks

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Just make sure wherever you are creating the ISO has plenty of space. pauls example has your user home directory as the location for the output, but you can change this where necessary, or just sit in the directory where you want to create it and then do:

 

dd if=/dev/cdrom of=isoimage.iso

 

note the difference versus pauls. Also, you can create an ISO image with K3B as well if you prefer to do it the GUI method. I'm sure in Gnome also with Brasero.

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  • 7 months later...

UPDATE: bigger problem. Just got lucky with that 1 distro. That's why no reply post.

 

 

 

 

Now 6 months laterI have tried 5-6 different distros on different brand media all in pristine condition. tried k3b and dd on two laptops running pclos2009.1 and one desktop with mdv2008.1. Not likely all three optical drives are bad. All discs are in pristine condition and I know they work b/c have done installs with them and md5 checks out.

 

K3b copies about 30-100mb then stalls with "problem reading sectors"

 

dd as root and as user also exit after partial reading with input/output error. I can see the iso file created in the destination folder but never complets. I have only been able to copy 2 cd isos out of about 15 discs. All drive lenses been cleaned.

 

Does K3b have problems reading .isos that were burned on a different optical drive than the one trying to read it? Or with reading sector sizes of 2048? Read somewhere that cd-rw drives read isos better than cdrom drives. All three are dvdrom drives.

 

Any ideas appreciated.

Edited by Trio3b
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Data burned to optical media is not always retained permanently. Over time read errors may develop. In my experience it seems that the data loss is accelerated by warm temperature. For the best chance of successfully reading faulty optical media I would suggest trying to read the media in as many different drives as you can. If the data integrity is marginal you will likely find that the discs read OK in some drives but not others.

 

By the way, when using a dd command such as "dd if=/dev/cdrom of=~/my-old-distro.iso" you may be able to increase read speed by adding a block size option such as bs=8192 or bs=32768. Without the bs option the block size will be 512 bytes.

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Are you saying this problem is occurring on all of your machines or just one?

 

 

Three different machines. Just found and copied a beatup and scratched vectorlinux disc successfully using dd. The deb discs are pristine but were not originally burned by me but both were kept in a warm location. I did try several block size options but no go on the debian discs.

 

Here is messages right after trying the debian dd:

 

Oct 14 09:40:01 laptop crond[13443]: (root) CMD ( /usr/share/msec/promisc_check.sh)

Oct 14 09:41:01 laptop crond[13521]: (root) CMD ( /usr/share/msec/promisc_check.sh)

Oct 14 09:42:02 laptop crond[13597]: (root) CMD ( /usr/share/msec/promisc_check.sh)

Oct 14 09:43:01 laptop crond[13696]: (root) CMD ( /usr/share/msec/promisc_check.sh)

Oct 14 09:43:03 laptop kernel: sr 1:0:0:0: [sr0] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE,SUGGEST_OK

Oct 14 09:43:03 laptop kernel: sr 1:0:0:0: [sr0] Sense Key : Medium Error [current]

Oct 14 09:43:03 laptop kernel: sr 1:0:0:0: [sr0] Add. Sense: L-EC uncorrectable error

Oct 14 09:43:03 laptop kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev sr0, sector 64

Oct 14 09:43:03 laptop kernel: Buffer I/O error on device sr0, logical block 16

Oct 14 09:43:03 laptop kernel: Buffer I/O error on device sr0, logical block 17

Oct 14 09:43:08 laptop kernel: sr 1:0:0:0: [sr0] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE,SUGGEST_OK

Oct 14 09:43:08 laptop kernel: sr 1:0:0:0: [sr0] Sense Key : Medium Error [current]

Oct 14 09:43:08 laptop kernel: sr 1:0:0:0: [sr0] Add. Sense: L-EC uncorrectable error

Oct 14 09:43:08 laptop kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev sr0, sector 64

Oct 14 09:43:08 laptop kernel: Buffer I/O error on device sr0, logical block 16

Oct 14 09:43:17 laptop kernel: sr 1:0:0:0: [sr0] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE,SUGGEST_OK

Oct 14 09:43:17 laptop kernel: sr 1:0:0:0: [sr0] Sense Key : Medium Error [current]

Oct 14 09:43:17 laptop kernel: sr 1:0:0:0: [sr0] Add. Sense: L-EC uncorrectable error

Oct 14 09:43:17 laptop kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev sr0, sector 64

Oct 14 09:43:17 laptop kernel: Buffer I/O error on device sr0, logical block 16

Oct 14 09:43:31 laptop kernel: sr 1:0:0:0: [sr0] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE,SUGGEST_OK

Oct 14 09:43:31 laptop kernel: sr 1:0:0:0: [sr0] Sense Key : Medium Error [current]

Oct 14 09:43:31 laptop kernel: sr 1:0:0:0: [sr0] Add. Sense: L-EC uncorrectable error

Oct 14 09:43:31 laptop kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev sr0, sector 64

Oct 14 09:43:31 laptop kernel: Buffer I/O error on device sr0, logical block 16

Oct 14 09:44:01 laptop crond[13774]: (root) CMD ( /usr/share/msec/promisc_check.sh)

Oct 14 09:45:01 laptop crond[13850]: (root) CMD ( /usr/share/msec/promisc_check.sh)

 

Anyway I have some releases on cd that are no longer available but really need to clean work area and would be nice to archive to HD, but I think this is going to be hit and miss. One thing I did notice is that the deb discs don't show up in the kde GUI notifier when inserted. I'm going to try more discs on several machines over the next few days and see if any patterns emerges.

 

Thanks

Edited by Trio3b
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