I'm not sure how well known this is, so forgive me if this seems obvious to you. But if you don't know about it this is a very handy trick.

I recently blew away my MediaX menu directory (doh) and needed to recover it from a burned DVD+R in my Xbox software collection. I searched around for a tool to allow me to read the disk in a Windows machine but I couldn't find one; that struck me as odd. I was about to run a long ethernet cable downstairs to FTP the files off my Xbox directly when inspiration struck.

I put the DVD+R in my DVD-ROM drive in my Linux workstation; this is IDE device /dev/hdc. Then I typed this:

CODE

extract-xiso -l /dev/hdc

Turns out that extract-xiso has no problems at all reading from raw /dev nodes; it worked fine! I then used extract-xiso to recover my files back from the DVD+R, which was both a lot quicker and a lot easier than FTPing them off an Xbox.

As I said, possibly this is a well-known trick, but I thought it was neat and just incase anyone didn't know you could do it... well, now you do!

Huge bump, but..

Found a variation on this, I wanted to create an XISO file from a Backup and created a local symlink of my raw device:

ln -s /dev/cdrom cdrom

and ran extract-xiso:

extract-xiso -r cdrom

You need the symlink because extract-xiso likes to rename the original file to cdrom.old, not a good idea for the raw device.

Unfortunately, i didn't get it to work to completion, but I suspect it was too many scratches on the disk.