Under Linux you can usually find this by inspecting the output of the following command (run this while a CD or DVD is inserted in your drive): The majority of the tools covered by this blog post need the device path of the CD drive as a command-line argument. Find the device path of the CD drive (Linux) Some can be used under Windows as well using Cygwin. All software mentioned here are open-source tools that are available for any modern Linux distribution (I’m using Linux Mint myself). The result of this particular exercise wasn’t all that successful, but I included it anyway, as some may find it useful.

In addition there’s a final section that covers my attempts at imaging a multisession / mixed mode CD.

How to check the integrity of the created ISO image.

How to create an ISO image from a CD-ROM or DVD.

How to figure out the device path of the CD drive.

I edited my original notes down to the following topics: Since this will probably be of interest to others as well, I decided to polish a selection from my rough working notes into a somewhat more digestible form (or so I hope!). Nevertheless, throughout the initial testing phase I was surprised at the number of useful tools that are available in the open source domain. At those volumes we will need a solution that involves the use of a disk robot, and these often require dedicated software (we still need to investigate this more in-depth). The main reason for this is the sheer size of the collection, which we estimated at some 15,000 physical carriers possibly even more.

It’s doubtful whether we’ll end up using these same tools in our actual workflows. During the initial phase of this work I did a number of tests with various open-source tools.

We’re currently investigating how to stabilise the contents of these materials using disk imaging. The KB has quite a large collection of offline optical media, such as CD-ROMs, DVDs and audio CDs.

Toast for mac mount disc image