Member Avatar for Member #1162018

I have an auxillary optical drive. It has been plugged in for a long time, but I almost never use it. I just noticed it has a DVD in it. Apparently, I downloaded an ISO of Linux Mint 19.1 with plans of learning the OS.

But just what 'type' of file is on the DVD? It doesn't seem to be usable in its present state. How can I render it usable, or should I just download another ISO? Properties says this is a CDFS File system.

Thanks

Linux_Mint.png

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Dani AI

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A quick, practical checklist for (and building on ’s suggestion to try a VM): the disc is showing a burned filesystem rather than a single “.iso” file because the installer image was written to the DVD. That is fine — you can either run it from the disc, extract an image from it, or create a USB image for easier use.

If you want to keep a single ISO file (handy for VirtualBox or re-burning):

  • Create an image of the disc (Windows tools like ImgBurn or similar, or on Linux):

    sudo dd if=/dev/sr0 of=~/linuxmint.iso bs=1M status=progress

  • Verify the image with a checksum:

    sha256sum linuxmint.iso

To make a USB installer (recommended these days): use a safe imager (balenaEtcher, Rufus on Windows, or dd on Linux). Example dd write (careful — this will erase the target drive):

sudo dd if=linuxmint.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=4M status=progress && sync

Replace /dev/sdX with the correct device (check lsblk or Disk Management first).

Troubleshooting tips and cautions:

  • Optical discs and drives can fail; if the disc reads oddly, ripping to an ISO and verifying the checksum will show errors.
  • If the machine won’t boot from the USB/DVD, check firmware settings (UEFI vs legacy/CSM and Secure Boot).
  • If you only want to try Mint, attach the ISO inside VirtualBox (Storage → attach ISO) and run a live session there.

If the DVD is old or damaged, re-downloading the latest Mint ISO and verifying its checksum is often the simplest, most reliable route.

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Member Avatar for rproffitt

To me that looks like a bootable disc. It's not very useful from Windows unless you wanted to run Linux in some Virtual Machine like VirtualBox.

There are so many tutorials on booting from your drive over the years. Even I noted it a while ago at http://tips.oncomputers.info/archives2004/0401/2004-Jan-11.htm and I'm sure there are thousands of pages about booting Linux.

Bootiing these discs are what I find folk stumble at. The disk is bootable. Not very useful if you are running Windows.

Edited by rproffitt
Member Avatar for Member #1162018

Thanks. Maybe I had plans to run it as a live DVD till I got to know more about it. I've done this with Ubuntu while having Windows installed.

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