These days, CDs and DVDs are becoming less popular, in favor of flash drives and other convenient, portable media. However, you still may come across them every once in a while, and if your computer has a CD drive, you should be able to insert a disc and mount it on Linux.
In this tutorial, you’ll see the Linux commands necessary to mount a CDROM.
In this tutorial you will learn:
- How to mount cdrom in Linux
| Category | Requirements, Conventions or Software Version Used |
|---|---|
| System | Any Linux distro |
| Software | N/A |
| Other | Privileged access to your Linux system as root or via the sudo command. |
| Conventions | # – requires given linux commands to be executed with root privileges either directly as a root user or by use of sudo command$ – requires given linux commands to be executed as a regular non-privileged user |
Mount CDROM in Linux
Follow along with the steps below to mount a CD or DVD in Linux. Start off by inserting the disc into your computer, then run through these steps:
- First, try using the
blkidcommand to see what device file your CD is using. Usually, this is going to be/dev/sr0, but it’s possible that yours is something different. You’ll know it’s the right one because it should sayISO9660
Viewing device file path of cdrom in Linux - Next, create a mount point for where you’d like to mount the CD to. Or, just pick an empty directory somewhere on your computer, if you already have a place in mind.
$ sudo mkdir /mnt/cdrom
- Now we can use the mount command to map the device file to the directory we’ve just created.
$ sudo mount /dev/sr0 /mnt/cdrom mount: /mnt/cdrom: WARNING: device write-protected, mounted read-only.
- Your CD or DVD should now be accessible in the directory which it was mounted to.
$ cd /mnt/cdrom
You can also verify that the mount was successful by using the
mountcommand without further options.$ mount | grep cdrom
Accessing a mounted cdrom in Linux - When you are done, just unmount the CD and eject it from the disc tray.
$ sudo umount /mnt/cdrom
Closing Thoughts
In this tutorial, we saw how to mount a CD or DVD rom on Linux systems. As you can see, the process is quite simple, and you will probably be able to do it in the future without a problem, now that you have done it once. Mounting and accessing a CDROM is pretty similar to mounting any other type of media.
