Creating a Debian ISO by merging all 3 iso parts to one for booting via usb

Question

I've downloaded the Debian DVD installation images from Debian, that's been split into 3 parts. I want to create a USB installation disk by merging all the 3 ISO to one ISO.

Here's the list of the things i've tried:

1) APTonCD: tried to mount the ISO to /media/cdrom so that APTonCD can recognize it as a DVD but it didnt.

2) Simple-CDD: throws an error while processing build-simple-cdd command after few minutes.

3) Yumi and Multisystem seems to have installation errors.

Please help.

As suggested by @kos, with reference to his answer from here, here are the few things he asked me to give the output of.

The output of lsblk is as follows.

cyberrspiritt@shazLaptop ~/Downloads/Debian DVDs $ lsblk
NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda      8:0    0 465.8G  0 disk 
├─sda1   8:1    0   100M  0 part 
├─sda2   8:2    0  78.1G  0 part 
├─sda3   8:3    0  74.5G  0 part 
├─sda4   8:4    0     1K  0 part 
├─sda5   8:5    0 209.2G  0 part 
├─sda6   8:6    0   3.7G  0 part 
├─sda7   8:7    0   3.8G  0 part 
└─sda8   8:8    0  96.3G  0 part /
sdb      8:16   0  15.1G  0 disk 
└─sdb1   8:17   0  15.1G  0 part /media/cyberrspiritt/24FD-9B66
sr0     11:0    1  1024M  0 rom  

I've merged the iso using cat in this way:

cyberrspiritt@shazLaptop ~/Downloads/Debian DVDs $ cat debian-8.0.0-amd64-DVD-1.iso debian-8.0.0-amd64-DVD-2.iso debian-8.0.0-amd64-DVD-3.iso > Debian.iso

and the command file Debian.iso prints out this:

cyberrspiritt@shazLaptop ~/Downloads/Debian DVDs $ file Debian.iso 
Debian.iso: x86 boot sector

Solution 1

You would need to extract the contents of all 3 disks, merge the actual deb files, generate new index files, and rebuild the DVD.

You may be better off exploring the possibility of building a custom ISO via a jigdo setup, using the data files you have to build a local apt mirror and using netinstall, or possibly using simple-cdd although this looks more like a tool to define what will be installed, not what is on the CD as an archive.

Quickest/easiest option would be to set up the USB drive as the first ISO w/ installer then use extra space to provide the ISOs to be copied to the target system, mounted via loop, and be recognized by apt-cdrom

Solution 2

Short, but not actual answer is: Replace the 3 DVDs by 1 BD image.

I downloaded the 3 DVDs, naming debian-10.2.0-amd64-DVD-1.iso, etc.

Then I use command

jigdo-lite https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/amd64/jigdo-bd/debian-10.2.0-amd64-BD-1.jigdo

to download BD image.

During this process, jigdo will ask repeatedly if you have some existing file.

So, just mount DVD-1, input path of DVD-1, wait jigdo verify the files. Then mount DVD-2, ...

This kind of operation seems like fixing exist *.iso.tmp files.

Anyway, after adding the 3 DVDs(~12GiB), there is still about 10GiB to download.

There are 4 BDs, but it may be really enough to only get the BD Volume 1.

Solution 3

Every individual dvd has different packages indexed already.So you should have to modify these packages.xz file and then merge those 3 dvd's by directly moving files to dvd1 from dvd2 and dvd3(copy paste)

Comments

[cyberrspiritt]

Which errors are h talking about? @muru

[kos]

Yes, as per how I read the question on Ask Ubuntu I tought those images were obtained by splitting a full CD / DVD image. They're not, they are part of a multi-CD / DVD installer as per what I'm reading now on Debian's website, so my suggestion is not valid anymore.

[cyberrspiritt]

So merging them wouldnt help if performed by cat. @kos

[cyberrspiritt]

AptonCD mounted the ISO successfully. Simple CDD did not even ask for the iso. So i suppose its nothing to do with the iso

[muru]

Then why do you say "it didn't"? O.o

[kos]

No, it won't. And I don't know how you could do this. However if you don't have any specific requirement to pick the full multi-CD / DVD installer and you just want to try / install Debian, an option is to pick the Live CD / DVD image and install it from there: debian.org/distrib

[cyberrspiritt]

The command build-simple-cdd threw an error yesterday. I'm currently using linux mint. Tried the command again just now. Worked fine. Although, i see files like rebecca_Release, files that are related to linux mint version. Is that suppose to be a problem?

[cyberrspiritt]

Or a better way could be to install debian via disk 1 and add the repo from the other two disks later after installation. Will that work? @kos

[kos]

As per what is written here, the second and third images are not bootable and contain just additional software which you can either install afterwards or just download using apt-get, so yes, you can just install Debian using the first image and use either methods to add software. You can use the method I proposed on Ask Ubuntu to create the USB installer, i.e. dd if=image.iso of=/dev/sdX or pv image.iso | dd of=/dev/sdX (where sdX is probably sdb judging from the size).

[Stephen Kitt]

Such images already exist, they’re the Blu-Ray images.