Problem: I created 3 DVD's filled with Windows system recovery disks in case I ever have a hardware problem and need to re-install Windows in order to run diagnostic tests. However, I don't want to worry about losing them, so I would like to make backups of the recovery disks as ISO images which I can store on an external hard drive.
A Google search revealed that I can do this using the dd (or "disk dump") unix command.
dd if=/dev/who-knows-where? of=/home/wdkrnls/x201-recovery-2011-09-30.iso
But the snag is that Ubuntu doesn't use the old convention of associating /dev/cdrom
with the cd-rom drive. Instead Nautilus automagically creates /media/CD_ROM
which is a directory, and not the drive itself. I tried to run dd
anyways and got:
/bin/dd: reading '/media/CD_ROM/': is a directory
0+0 records in
0+0 records out
0 bytes (0 B) copied, 0.0158501 s, 0.0 kB/s
I tried running dmesg | tail
and saw a reference to:
[215135.134164] sr 9:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg1 type 5
So I tried ls /dev/sg1
, but there wasn't any file called that. Only my partitions show up with sudo fdisk -l
, leaving me stumped as to what to try next.
Solution: I figured out I could solve my problem with brasero or k3b and so abandoned my exploration of Ubuntu's internals. Nevertheless, I still wouldn't mind knowing how I would use dd to accomplish the same task.
How would I solve my problem with dd
?