Good Open Source/Free Program to Convert a bz2 file to ISO?

Question

I have a very large bz2 file which I want to convert to a ISO image. Are there any good open source/free programs that can do this WITHOUT having to extract it first?

EDIT: When I mean "without having to extract it first", I mean not having to extract the entire archive to my hard drive and then convert it to ISO.

Solution 1

When I mean "without having to extract it first", I mean not having to extract the entire archive to my hard drive and then convert it to ISO.

The bad news: you will have to extract it.

The good news: you don't have to extract it to your hard drive, you can do it all by piping to stdin, so it all happens in memory (which is basically what converting would do).

You'll need mkisofs and bzcat (or bzip2 -dc), both can be installed with cygwin. Then it's just a matter of:

bzcat file.bz2 | mkisofs -o image.iso -stream-media-size #

where file.bz2 is your archive and # is the media size in sectors.

If your archive is actually a bzipped TAR archive, something like this would be more appropriate:

tar --to-stdout xjf file.tar.bz2 | mkisofs -o image.iso -stream-media-size #

Solution 2

No!

They are packaged inside a bz2 file therefore part of the conversion process would be to extract.

Comments

[Pekka]

Do you want to put the bz2 file onto a CD/DVD zipped or unzipped?

[Kryten]

No, what I want to do is create a ISO containing the bz2 archive unzipped (i.e. the contents in the ISO) and then mount the ISO in a Virtual Machine

[Pekka]

Ah. Well if you're on Linux, you might be able to put something together with bzip piping its output to a tool that can create an ISO from user input. You could try and check ISO generator tools for what kind of input they accept.

[Kryten]

Anything like that for Windows?

[Kryten]

When I mean "without having to extract it first", I mean not having to extract the entire archive to my hard drive and then convert it to ISO.

[quack quixote]

+1 thanks for dropping a good example of mkisofs. i was a bit slammed earlier and couldn't get to it.

[quack quixote]

technically they're packaged inside a TAR file (or other archive format), which is then BZipped. bzip2 doesn't archive files, it's just a stream compression format.