Burning multiple linux ISO images to DVD

[K. Tsang]

Hello all, I have several ISO images of RHEL5 Server and like to burn them to DVD so that I can boot from the DVD for installation. I know if I just "create disc from image" in my burning software only 1 image get burn to the disc. So how can I consolidate all these images?

[Jesper de Jong]

As far as I know, it is not possible to put multiple ISO images on one disc. You'll need to burn them to separate CD or DVD discs.

[K. Tsang]

Alright. How about if I don't burn to discs and put these ISO images to external hard disk and have a ini file to boot from the first ISO. But then how would this ini file look like?

[Tim Holloway]

The first question is: 1) do you want "multiple ISO images" as in the DVD contains ".iso" files, or 2) do you want to take multiple ISO files and create a DVD whose files contain a composite of what's in those images?

Case #1 is easy, except that you'd better be talking custom spins, since the full kit for a single RHEL pretty much fills the 4.7GB capacity of a DVD.

Case #2 has been done - I got a multi-distro DVD in a magazine several years ago. The boot program gave a menu of the different OS options. The easiest way to create something like this is to mount the ISOs on loopback devices, pull files as needed, add the necessary glue, then use the resulting directory tree as the source for a new composite ISO.

If you simply want different custom installs of a specific release RHEL, a better alternative would be to keep one master distro on the DVD and add kickstarts to the final ISO source. That's fairly easy to do.