.iso's and Wine

(WARNING: Only make copies of production CDs/DVDs for your personal use ONLY. I will not be responsible for any redistribution of copy-right material.) 

Hey everyone welcome back. For this post I will be showing you how to make an .iso (Disc Image) of a game CD and be able to use it instead of a physical disc to play the game. Keep in mind that some discs have things to try and prevent copying such as soft-bits. You will also need the programs DD, and the Windows API program Wine, in order to run windows applications. (You can obtain these programs from your distributions package manager if they are not already installed) Other then that, lets get started.

First things first. We need to create a folder to mount our .iso that we will create. For now lets do everything within you personal "Home" folder. As you see in Figure 1-1 we need to issue the command mkdir to creat a directory. For this example lets name it mnt-iso. (command is: mkdir mnt-iso) Good, you have now created the directory we are going to mount our .iso file to.

For this demonstration we will be making a .iso image of a disc from the game "Morrowind". The first thing we will do is insert the Morrowind CD into our CD or DVD rom drive. Once the disc is inserted we will need to create a copy of the disc. To do this we will issue the command, (dd if=/dev/cdrom of=Morrowind.iso). For the command DD, "if" means input file, and "of" is equal to the output file. The program DD, or data dump, will try to create an exact image of your CD or DVD bit for bit.

Doing the above process may take some time. Depending on how fast the disc is spinning, your drive speed and a few other factors. Once the image is created it is time to mount our image. As shown in Figure 1-1, we will need to issue the following command to mount our newly created .iso image. (mount -t iso9660 -o loop Morrowind.iso mnt-iso/) Please note, if you are not in your home folder you will have to give the full path. (In most cases you will need Admin "Root" privileges to mount something, so don't forget that)

Now that the .iso image is mounted, we need to let Wine know that the mnt-iso folder we created is a Virtual CD-Rom Drive. To do this we need to run the command (winecfg) in the command line to enter the Wine configuration tool. (See Figures 1-2 to 1-4 for more information) Once in winecfg, we need to goto the "Drives" tab at the top of the window. Once there click the "Add" button and choose a Drive Letter. Once created we need to give our newly created drive some more input. If you choose say drive letter "F:", click the letter F from the window above. Now click the "Browse" button and navigate to the "mnt-iso" directory we created earlier an click OK.

We are almost done. Next Click the "Show Advanced" button and change the type from Auto to CD-Rom. After that click Apply in the bottom right corner of the "Winecfg" menu and then click Ok. You are finished. Now eject the Physical "Morrowind" disc from the CD-rom/DVD drive and try to launch the game. If all was successful the game should run without the physical disk. You are now running off a digital copy of the physical disc on your hard-drive. That about wraps it up.

This trick can be used on things other then games. You can also use the .iso creating method to backup your physical discs. Hope you enjoyed and good luck.

(Click any to Enlarge)

Figure 1-1

Figure 1-2

Figure 1-3

Figure 1-4