I believe this will give you what you are looking for.

Assumptions:
a. Your CD-ROM mounts at /mnt/cdrom
b. Your disk drive has enough space
c. The commands are installed on your system.
d. The cd you want to put on a "virtual drive" is a Star Office disc (used
only for descriptive file/directory naming, change for your application)

1. Mount the CD-ROM you wish to use: "mount -t iso9660 /dev/cdrom
/mnt/cdrom"

2. Create a directory on a partition with enough space where you want:
"mkdir /home/fred/star_office_cd" and " mkdir /home/fred/soffice"

3. Use dd to make an iso image from the cdrom: "dd if=/dev/cdrom
of=/home/fred/star_office_cd/soffice.iso

4. Edit the file /etc/fstab with your favorite editor (as root): "pico
/etc/fstab"

5. Add the following line to it (all on one line):
/home/fred/star_office_cd/soffice.iso /home/fred/soffice auto
user,iocharset=iso8859-1,sync,exec,codepage=850,ro,auto,loop 0 0

6. The line will make it automount at boot in /home/fred/soffice/* or you
can change the "auto" to "noauto" to have to mount it with "mount
/home/fred/star_office_cd/soffice.iso /home/fred/soffice".


If you don't use the image all that often, you can use tar & gzip to
compress it and make a simple shell script to automatically uncompress it
and mount it, then another one to dismount and delete the uncompressed
image, keeping the compressed one safe.  But that's another story.

Chad


-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Brian Parish
Sent: Monday, February 18, 2002 10:10 PM
To: expert
Subject: Re: [expert] virtual drive for Linux?


Well if you have your CD mounted, it's just another file system.
/mnt/cdrom or whatever right?  Therefore if you make a directory - say
~/cdrom and copy the contents of the CD to it and make everything from
~/cdrom on down read only, wouldn't that look pretty much the same?

Maybe you are thinking in windoze terms. Basically the cd emulators
exist to associate a drive letter with a file (usually the ISO image of
the CD).  But in a real operating system, where everything is already a
file....

Or am I missing something here?

HTH
Brian

On Tue, 2002-02-19 at 13:57, mike wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I hope this isn't dumb, and that something isn't already installed in my
> system,
> but ...
>
> Is there software similar to virtual drive ( the cd drive emulator )?
>
> I have some cd I would like to use in linux from a virtual cd drive, so
> I don't have to use the cd all the time.
>
> Is this at all possible?
>
> Mike
>
> ----
>

> Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft?
> Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com





Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? 
Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com

Reply via email to