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Dumping CD/DVD-ROM from Linux!

Recently a friend of mine gave me a couple CD-ROM games to try getting to work. It's no easy task as they're all from around 2001 and run on Windows 95/98/2000/XP. Now, I did try running them on Windows 10, but it wouldn't work. So, I decided to try them out in a VM running the classic, Windows 98 SE.

But only issue, My USB2IDE adapter is really slow, and a few of those games require an 8x CD reader, something which my USB adapter doesn't quite support, so let's turn to dumping the games to easily managable ISO files!

Linux isn't like most operating systems, Linux won't do stuff for you. So let's go over the basic requirements. You'll need the following on your system:

* GNU Coreutils (If you don't have it, you already know what to do, stop reading this) * cdrtools

With those both established, we can get to the point of the article, Actually dumping the CDs!

To get the CDs properties (Block size, etc.) you have to use the previously installed cdrtools package. The values we're after here are the Logical block size, and Volume size.

$ isoinfo -d -i /dev/sr0 Setting input-charset to 'UTF-8' from locale. CD-ROM is in ISO 9660 format System id: Volume id: NEW Volume set id: Publisher id: Data preparer id: Application id: NERO___BURNING_ROM Copyright File id: Abstract File id: Bibliographic File id: Volume set size is: 1 Volume set sequence number is: 1 Logical block size is: 2048 <- Volume size is: 235861 <- Joliet with UCS level 3 found. No SUSP/Rock Ridge present

Now that we've got the two values we need, it's time to actually do the dumping.

You'll have to modify the command a bit for your specific CD/DVD. You have to put YOUR Logical block size into the "bs=<block size>" parameter of the dd command. Same with the Volume size, put the number into the "count=<volume size>" parameter.

The command in my case looks like this:

$ sudo dd if=/dev/sr0 of=off-piste.iso bs=2048 count=235861 status=progress 478529536 bytes (479 MB, 456 MiB) copied, 122 s, 3.9 MB/s 235861+0 records in 235861+0 records out 483043328 bytes (483 MB, 461 MiB) copied, 122.841 s, 3.9 MB/s

Congratulations! You've officially dumped a CD/DVD-ROM under Linux!