mykrocosm

We’ve got the CD images for Fedora Core 4 at work, but I’d prefer to have the DVD. Unfortunately, HTTP downloads seem to choke on files greater than 2 gb, and FTP is firewalled.

I found a little-known way to recombine the CD images, thanks to a small utility called Jigdo, the template files FC4-i386-DVD.jigdo & FC4-i386-DVD.template and an obscure forum post here.

First I used WinRAR to extract all the CD images to a single directory (C:\fc4\), explicitly not overwriting any existing files.

Then I ran the jigdo command:

C:\jigdo\jigdo-bin>jigdo-file mi -i FC4-i386-DVD.iso -j FC4-i386-DVD.jigdo -t FC4-i386-DVD.template c:\fc4\
Found 1855 of the 1856 files required by the template
Copied input files to temporary file `FC4-i386-DVD.iso.tmp' - repeat command and supply more files to continue


Uh oh. I repeated the command with the pm (print missing) parameter:

C:\jigdo\jigdo-bin>jigdo-file pm -i FC4-i386-DVD.iso -j FC4-i386-DVD.jigdo -t FC4-i386-DVD.template c:\fc4\
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/ linux/core/4/i386/os/isolinux/isolinux.bin


Now this already exists in C:\fc4\isolinux\ so it should have been picked up. A bug in jigdo-file or the template perhaps? I downloaded the file again from that URL just in case, and it turned out to be the exact same size and date. I placed it in the root of the search path (C:\fc4\), and ran jigdo-file again:

C:\jigdo\jigdo-bin>jigdo-file mi -i FC4-i386-DVD.iso -j FC4-i386-DVD.jigdo -t FC
4-i386-DVD.template c:\fc4\
Found 1 of the 1 files required by the template
Successfully created `FC4-i386-DVD.iso'


Mounted the ISO in a VM and it booted. Sweet!

This entry was posted on Monday, July 11th, 2005 at 1:07 pm and is filed under Work, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.