So I have a need to get a dummy .iso image that doesn’t do anything. Basically it’s a dirty hack for running a VPS on Vultr that starts off needing an ISO image attached, but later on after installing needs the ISO removed. vultr-cli tool lacks the ability to remove an ISO from an instance, so the next best thing I though of was to overwrite the setting by attaching a .iso that doesn’t do anything.
In theory, the computer will load the ISO, realize it can’t be booted, and choose the next bootable device, the system disk.
So I need to create a dummy iso file somehow. Something that’s valid that Vultr will accept into it’s databanks. I already tried a 1MB empty file with the .iso extension and that wasn’t accepted into Vultr’s console, so my next idea is to create a dummy image using a linux CLI software.
I found cdrtools in the AUR, so I installed that. It provided the binary, genisoimage which I used to create an iso from a directory containing a single text document.
genisoimage -o null.iso ./dummy
And now we have a valid iso file
$ file dummy.iso ✔
dummy.iso: ISO 9660 CD-ROM filesystem data 'CDROM'
This file is available for free download https://grimtech.net/assets/dummy.iso