ISO image
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| ISO image | |
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| File extension: | .iso |
|---|---|
| Uniform Type Identifier: | public.iso-image |
| Type of format: | Disk image |
| Standard(s): | ISO 9660 |
An ISO image (.iso) is a disk image of an ISO 9660 file system. More loosely, it refers to any optical disc image, even a UDF image.
As is typical for disc images, in addition to the data files that are contained in the ISO image, it also contains all the filesystem metadata, (boot code, structures, and attributes). All of this information is contained in a single file. These properties make it an attractive alternative to physical media for the distribution of software that requires this additional information as it is simple to retrieve over the Internet.
Some of the common uses include the distribution of operating systems, such as Linux or BSD systems, and LiveCDs.
Most CD/DVD authoring utilities can deal with ISO images: Producing them either by copying the data from existing media or generating new ones from existing files, or using them to create a copy on physical media. Most operating systems (including Mac OS, Mac OS X, BSD, Linux, and Windows with Microsoft Virtual CD-ROM panel) allow these images to be mounted as if they were physical discs, making them somewhat useful as a universal archive format.
Console emulators, such as ePSXe, and many other emulators that read from CD/DVD, are able to run ISO/BIN (and other similar formats) instead of running directly from the CD drive. Better performance is achieved by running an ISO since there is no waiting for the drive to be ready and the hard drive I/O speed is many times faster than the CD/DVD drive.
[edit] See Also
- 7-Zip - An open source file archiver that can handle ISO images.
- Alcohol 120% - A CD/DVD burner and image mounting program that can also create ISO files from discs.
- DAEMON Tools - A utility to mount ISO images on Windows which is supported by optional advertisements.
- dd (Unix) - Linux/UNIX command doing low-level copy,including generating ISO image from a CD.
- ISO files can be mounted directly in Linux with the single command:
mount -o loop -t iso9660 filename.iso /mnt/iso(assuming the directory /mnt/iso exists). - ISO images can also be made in Linux with simple commands:
mkisofs -J -o filename.iso directory name. Using-Jpreserves the Windows Joliet extensions, meaning the data in the directory should be readable on Windows systems.
- ISO files can be mounted directly in Linux with the single command:
- Disk Utility - Mac OS X's general disk utility, it can create and mount disk images.
- DiskImageMounter - Utility in Mac OS X that handles disk images when double clicked.
- File Roller - A Unix frontend for extracting ISO files.
- ImgBurn - A full-featured freeware program for ripping ISOs and burning many image types to writable media.
- IsoBuster - A shareware program that can extract ISOs, plus full CD descriptions in various modes, and handle and extract ISO and related files.
- ISO Master - An open source program to create and edit ISO images in Linux.
- ISO Recorder - A free (for personal use) ISO creation and writing tool for Windows XP and later.
- LC ISO Creator - A free and tiny (23kB) ISO creation tool for Windows NT/2000/XP.
- MagicDISC - A free Disk image emulator with sophisticated compression capabilities.
- Nero Burning ROM - A commercial CD and DVD burning program that can burn ISO images to disc.
- Toast - A commercial CD mastering program that can mount many sorts of disk images, including both sides of a HFS/ISO9660 hybrid image.
- Disco - A commercial Mac OS X mastering program which allows users to burn CDs and DVDs with multisession support, disc duplication, burning VIDEO_TS folders, disc-spanning as well as a searchable disc index, dubbed Discography.
- Power Archiver - A shareware file archiver that can handle ISO images.
- PowerISO - A shareware program which can mount, edit and extract many disk image formats.
- WinRAR - A shareware file archiver that can handle ISO images.
- Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel - A free tool from Microsoft to mount ISO images as drives.
- UltraISO - An application for creating, modifying and converting ISO.
