Creating ISO images in Windows
I hardly can image today how we (as infosec pros) lived without virtualization (VMware, Virtual PC, Xen, Paralells...) a few years ago. As a security professional, I use virtualization software every day for several tasks, such as penetration testing, malware analysis, computer forensics, honeynet deployments, security training and live presentations and demos. Lots of times I need to boot multiple virtual machines from Linux based live CDs (or DVDs), to simulate specific system and networking environments. BTW, my preferred ones are BackTrack, (old) Auditor, Helix, Insert, or my own Knoppix-based home-made distribution.
Obviously, with a single CD drive in your computer, you cannot boot from multiple CDs unless you are really fast changing CDs (;-)) or you have each as an ISO image file.
In Linux, it is pretty trivial to create an ISO image file from a CD through the standard mkisofs command.
In Windows, although one of the most commonly used CD/DVD burning software vendors is determined to make this almost impossible (specially in the latest versions), there is an easy to use, tiny and really fast freeware tool, called LCISOCreator.exe. Give it a try!
As an alternative, you can use the standard Linux dd command (or one of its variants, like dcfldd) to make a binary copy of a CD into a file:
# dd if=/dev/cdrom of=cd_image.iso
In Windows, you can use the porting of the dd command for this purpose:
C:\> dd if=\\.\D: of=cd_image.iso
Obviously, with a single CD drive in your computer, you cannot boot from multiple CDs unless you are really fast changing CDs (;-)) or you have each as an ISO image file.
In Linux, it is pretty trivial to create an ISO image file from a CD through the standard mkisofs command.
In Windows, although one of the most commonly used CD/DVD burning software vendors is determined to make this almost impossible (specially in the latest versions), there is an easy to use, tiny and really fast freeware tool, called LCISOCreator.exe. Give it a try!
As an alternative, you can use the standard Linux dd command (or one of its variants, like dcfldd) to make a binary copy of a CD into a file:
# dd if=/dev/cdrom of=cd_image.iso
In Windows, you can use the porting of the dd command for this purpose:
C:\> dd if=\\.\D: of=cd_image.iso
posted by Raul Siles at 12:07 AM
1 Comments:
For the GUI-lover in all of us, I'll do you one better:
http://isorecorder.alexfeinman.com/isorecorder.htm
It creates a context-menu item of "Create image from CD". Also, you have one-right-click access to burn ISOs as well. Doesn't seem to work too well in Vista, though. Then again, what does?
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