What to do with ISO Files

By ISO files we mean files that have been formatted to the ISO 9660 (generally level 2) standard for CDROM data. This file format can be burned directly to CD and generally to DVD (in the UDF/ISO bridge form), or you can examine the file contents directly, depending on what resources you have available.

Burning to Disk

Many commercial software packages for burning CDs will be able to burn an ISO image directly onto the disk, though you may have to hunt for the right option. Look in the help/manual for information on creating and burning "disk images".

Note: If you just add the .iso file to the list of files to burn, you won't get a usable result - you'll get a CD which will just show the .iso file in its root directory. You may have to change the extension, depending on your software, to get it to recognise the .iso file as a pre-mastered disk image instead of a regular input file.

On linux systems, you can used the cdrecord command-line utility to burn .iso files onto CDs. For DVDs, use the growisofs command. Alternately, a GUI interface like X-CD-Roast may also be available.

Reading the File Directly

Sometimes you can inspect the contents of the .iso file without having to burn it onto a disk. This depends heavily on your OS:

Windows

MagicISO seems to be a popular shareware program for performing various tasks with ISOs. There are also commercial options as well. Note, however, that we have no information on Vista systems - everything we could find was for XP, etc. If you know something that we don't, please do tell us!

Mac

Users of reasonably contemporary Macs (OS/X, OS9) can put the .iso file on your desktop and double-click it to have the file opened as a virtual disk drive (a drive icon appears) that you can then browse. In some circumstances this might even be done for you automatically.

Linux

If you have root privileges, you can mount the .iso file on a loop-back device and browse its contents. The simplest form of this command looks like this:

% mount file.iso /mnt/readiso -t iso9660 -o loop

where "file.iso" is the name of the ISO image to be read and "/mnt/readiso" is a mount point created for the image. The option details depend on your specific flavor of Linux (the above works in Red Hat r4), so consult your mount command documentation before attempting this.

There are also some shareware and freeware ISO file manipulators out there for Linux systems, but no one seems to stand out in the small crowd.