Mad Magazine ISO to USB

Ask Fedora
1

Many years ago I created an ISO of 50 Years of Mad. I used Image Burn on Windows. The source DVD when inserted would be read and Mad would open with menus etc. It was just like reading the paper magazine but on the computer. I’m now using Fedora Workstation 43 and I would like to burn the ISO to a Flash drive. I’m confused about burning a bootable flash drive as the magazine isn’t an OS. But I think it should open when the flash drive is inserted. The the best explanation I have. Help please.

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2

Hi John,

Pretty easy actually …

  1. make certain you have a USB larger than the DEV/CDROM content
  2. insert the USB stick
  3. lsscsi — find out which disk the USB appears to be (in a 1 disk system it is usually /dev/sda)
  4. insert your DVD/CDROM into your player
  5. lsscsi — find out which disk the CDROM/DVD is (usuall /dev/cdrom or /dev/sr0)
  6. on the command line
    dd if=/dev/cdrom of=/dev/sda bs=1024
    When the command completes, type sync at the command line (making certain to flush the I/O buffers to finish the write to USB.

You should now have an exact copy of your DVD/CDROM on the USB stick that will appear as anther CDROM/DVD and behave accordingly …

3

You should just be able to use Fedora Media Writer to write the ISO file to any suitably sized USB drive, just like you’d create a Live USB drive.

Any unused space will (probably) be wasted on the USB so pick something suitably sized.

4

This presumably relied on a Windows program autorunning when the CD was inserted into a Windows computer.

You can make a faithful copy of the CD onto a USB, but when you plug that USB into a Linux machine, it’s not going to run that same “read it like a paper magazine” program.

5

Maybe use Wine to run that Windows .exe?

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6

I may not have been clear. I have the *.iso file on the computer. I no longer have the DVD. I will sort through your ideas. Thanks everyone.

7

Open ISO with archiver of choice and pull out your PDF’s or whatever they are. That gets you all the contents back and you can do with them what you will.

8

You can mount the ISO file via a loop device.

See man losetup to get started on using loop devices.

9

I’m not real good at using the forum software. I hope my thanks are getting to all who reply.

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10

The mount command will take care of the loop device if needed, for example

sudo mount -r Fedora-Workstation-Live-43-1.6.x86_64.iso /mnt
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11

Thanks for all the replies

12

other ways you can flash the iso onto a usb is open a terminal window, and find your usb mounts:

lsblk

Then unmount the partitions of the usb:

sudo umount /dev/sdX1

Then write the iso partition onto the usb:

sudo dd if=/path/to/filename.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=4M status=progress oflag=sync

then when done, eject the usb:

sudo eject /dev/sdX

Keep in mind this will write a read only file system onto the usb so you lose the ability to erase as well as add anything to the USB. But this is the way I write usb drives for distributing software that I just want the usb drive used for exclusively.