USB external DVD/CD Drive in Linux OS.

[Gryd3]

I have a few things I want to try tomorrow. I'm right there, I just know it! Thanks for all the help. I'll keep you informed as to my progress.

Sounds good. Explore and experiment.
Remember that symlinks and the fstab file will remain after a reboot.

 

[ADRT]

Yeah played around a lot today. At one point I screwed up fstab somehow. Couldn't figure out how to fix it so I just deleted all the partitions and reloaded the OS.

 

[Gryd3]

Yeah played around a lot today. At one point I screwed up fstab somehow. Couldn't figure out how to fix it so I just deleted all the partitions and reloaded the OS.

An alternative to using the fstab is using the 'mount' family of commands. It will let you 'remount' , unmount, and mount new/different devices while the OS is live. If something messes up, you can reboot.

 

[ADRT]

So tried making a symlink today in several different variations, but none of them did what I wanted to do. That being said I found that I can start the update process by simply double clicking the bin file "updateSystem" from the directory on the cd. So while I have been unable to get the icon to work with the USB CD-ROM I ultimately accomplished what I wanted which is to be able to do the updates from the USB CD-ROM. I'll keep playing around with it, but I'm pretty happy with where I'm at now.

Thanks so much for all the help Gryd3. I really appreciate it.

 

[Gryd3]

So tried making a symlink today in several different variations, but none of them did what I wanted to do. That being said I found that I can start the update process by simply double clicking the bin file "updateSystem" from the directory on the cd. So while I have been unable to get the icon to work with the USB CD-ROM I ultimately accomplished what I wanted which is to be able to do the updates from the USB CD-ROM. I'll keep playing around with it, but I'm pretty happy with where I'm at now.

Thanks so much for all the help Gryd3. I really appreciate it.

good to hear.
Funny it was so simple...
Well. You've learned some tricks along the way.

 

[ADRT]

So Gryd3 this actually is not that simple. I found shortly after this that the updates where actually not going through. I actually tried to update the OS this way and it gave me an error stating that the CD was corrupt. So I did a little more digging in the file system and found a rule file in /etc/udev/rules.d that will not allow certain devices to boot on start up or change the system in anyway.

All this being said my predecessor told me that there was a way to do this with a USB thumb drive. Lol. So I spent all this time messing around with the cd thing and all I needed to do was create an .iso image and place it on a thumb drive. I did this by typing in term,

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

This creates an iso image of the cd and places it in /home/user. All I had to do then was simply copy and paste it to the thumb drive.

I'm sure I could edit the rule files to get the USB CDROM to work, but for now this is much easier and works great. Thanks again for all the help.

Oh, and also I followed someones advice on another forum and tried creating the .iso image and placing it directly in the thumb drive. This didn't work out so hot as it screwed up the partitions on the thumb drive and would not even boot after that. Was able to repair the drive with bootice thankfully, but just goes to show you gotta watch out for these forum guys.

 

[Gryd3]

So Gryd3 this actually is not that simple. I found shortly after this that the updates where actually not going through. I actually tried to update the OS this way and it gave me an error stating that the CD was corrupt. So I did a little more digging in the file system and found a rule file in /etc/udev/rules.d that will not allow certain devices to boot on start up or change the system in anyway.

All this being said my predecessor told me that there was a way to do this with a USB thumb drive. Lol. So I spent all this time messing around with the cd thing and all I needed to do was create an .iso image and place it on a thumb drive. I did this by typing in term,

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

This creates an iso image of the cd and places it in /home/user. All I had to do then was simply copy and paste it to the thumb drive.

I'm sure I could edit the rule files to get the USB CDROM to work, but for now this is much easier and works great. Thanks again for all the help.

Oh, and also I followed someones advice on another forum and tried creating the .iso image and placing it directly in the thumb drive. This didn't work out so hot as it screwed up the partitions on the thumb drive and would not even boot after that. Was able to repair the drive with bootice thankfully, but just goes to show you gotta watch out for these forum guys.

Very glad to hear!
Thank you for the update.
As you have noticed with the thumbdrive... the 'dd' command can be very powerful, which of course can be used for good or evil. Used incorrectly, you can easily wipe any disk you were wanting to copy from or save a file to Just a word of warning.