Make Cisco NonBootable DVDs Bootable with Free Software - CUCM, UCCX, CUPS

By Aaron Harrison : Development Engineer at IPCommute UK

There are lots of scenarios I come up against where I need to quickly get a new lab system built, and don't have the correct bootable DVD to hand. For some versions of the applications I work with, I can use an older DVD to boot up, and then a downloaded ISO image to patch that version up to the version I need.

Sometimes it would be better to have a single DVD to boot from, and if I didn't have a backup copy of an older DVD, I would be stuck.

My inspiration for this came from here : http://htluo.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/how-to-make-non-bootable-iso-image.html, but I wanted an option I could use without purchasing any extra software to set this up. I also found that the version of the DVD I took the boot sector from needed to be quite close to the version I wanted to boot, which wasn't always something I had to hand.

So - with no further ado, here is how I create myself a bootable DVD from a downloaded Cisco ISO image.

1) Obtain CDRT (some open source, free CDR tools)

Download cdrtools, latest stable from http://www.student.tugraz.at/thomas.plank/ (get the 'Latest Stable' release, dlls.zip and cygwin1.dll).

Extract all the files to a directory, e.g c:\cdrt so they are all in this root folder. It should look like so from a command prompt:

C:\cdrt>dir

Volume in drive C is OSDisk

Volume Serial Number is B435-7D0A

Directory of C:\cdrt

22/10/2011 10:34

.

22/10/2011 10:34

..

22/10/2011 10:11 892 1.txt

22/10/2011 10:11 548 2.txt

03/06/2010 16:17 10,752 align_test.exe

23/07/2010 11:43 132,728 AN-3.00.txt

03/06/2010 16:17 7,680 avoffset.exe

03/06/2010 16:17 120,320 btcflash.exe

03/06/2010 16:17 251,392 cdda2wav.exe

03/06/2010 16:17 382,976 cdrecord.exe

27/12/2006 19:16 999,424 cygiconv-2.dll

28/10/2006 20:35 31,744 cygintl-8.dll

29/03/2011 10:11 2,666,500 cygwin1.dll

03/06/2010 16:17 86,528 devdump.exe

03/06/2010 16:17 84,480 isodebug.exe

03/06/2010 16:17 89,600 isodump.exe

03/06/2010 16:17 100,352 isoinfo.exe

03/06/2010 16:17 91,136 isovfy.exe

03/06/2010 16:17 345,600 mkisofs.exe

03/06/2010 16:17 228,352 readcd.exe

03/06/2010 16:17 72,704 rscsi.exe

03/06/2010 16:17 122,880 scgcheck.exe

03/06/2010 16:17 117,760 scgskeleton.exe

21 File(s) 5,944,348 bytes

2 Dir(s) 40,008,544,256 bytes free

C:\cdrt>

From a command line you should be able to run mkisofs and see some help info. If you see the help info, you are probably good to go.

2) Obtain a Good Archive Manager - 7-ZIP

Download 7-zip (http://www.7-zip.org/) and install it if you don't already have it. You can use WinRAR if you like, but I like free stuff and find 7-zip has support for most types of archive I run into.

3) Obtain your Target DVD Image

Download a non-bootable Cisco image (CUCM, CUC, UCCX, whatever you have - anything based on the familiar Cisco linux OS).

Right click the file, and click '7-Zip\Extract files...' to extract the contents to a specified folder (not the c:\cdrt folder, but a new temporary folder such as c:\temp\dvdextract).

4) Create the Bootable ISO Image

Start a command prompt, and change to the directory into which you extracted the DVD, e.g. c:\temp\dvdextract.

C:\>cd temp
C:\temp>cd dvdextract
C:\temp\dvdextract>

Once there, copy isolinux.bin.orig over the current isolinux.bin. I'm no expert on Linux or isolinux, but I've noticed that the isolinux.bin file is modified when you run the command to create the ISO. Doing this means you are starting with an unmodified isolinux.bin.

C:\temp\dvdextract>copy isolinux\isolinux.bin.orig isolinux\isolinux.bin

Overwrite isolinux\isolinux.bin? (Yes/No/All): y

1 file(s) copied.

C:\temp\dvdextract>

Finally, run the command to generate the bootable ISO image. This should all be typed continuously, any wrapping here is due to the display on this page.

C:\temp\dvdextract>c:\cdrt\mkisofs -o c:\temp\newbootable.iso -R -J -hide-rr-moved -v -d -N -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 32 -boot-info-table -b isolinux/isolinux.bin .

A few minutes later, you should have the specified ISO image (c:\temp\newbootable.iso), and you can delete you c:\temp\dvdextract directory once you have verified it works.

Now - a couple of final warnings:

- I've heard rumours that it is possible to differentiate between systems built this way, and systems built using an 'official' bootable DVD. So I would recommend strongly that you do not do this on a production server in any scenario. Order the DVDs properly, and use official media. I maintain myself a library of images, and name those ISOs to indicate to mself that they are official bootable ISO images to differentiate those from the ones I have made bootable myself for lab and testing purposes.

- Some recent DVDs I have tried appear to work - they boot and install, but then once completed there are no installed services or management applications. This is odd, perhaps Cisco have done something new to prevent this working! But for most versions, it works just fine.

By Aaron Harrison : Development Engineer at IPCommute UK