At present I'm working with several iso images burned to disk to get a free Linux distro installed from an iso image burned to a cd-r. The full definition of just what is an iso9660 type image is described at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_image as follows:
ISO image
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ISO imageFile extension:.isoType of format:
Disk imageAn
ISO image (.iso) is an informal term for a
disk image of an
ISO 9660 file system. More loosely, it refers to any
optical disk image, even a
UDF image.
As is typical for disk 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,
BSD,
Linux, and
Windows, with third-party tools) allow these images to be
mounted as if they were physical
disks, 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.
A copy of CD contents, stored as an .iso file, is made this way: the
ripper searches for the sectors of the CD that have been used, say 251,000 for instance (there are 330,000 sectors on a 74 min CD and 360,000 sectors on an 80 min CD). Each sector is copied to the .ISO file, one by one. For CDs each sector is 2048 bytes, the .ISO file should then be of size 251,000 x 2048 = 514,408,000 bytes.
Nero .NRG files are .ISO files plus a small file
header.
[
edit]
http://www.computerforum.com/
See also
- DAEMON Tools - A free-to-use utility to mount ISO images on Windows, Mac and Linux.
- UltraISO - A shareware program to create, edit & mount ISO images in Windows.
- Alcohol 120% - A CD\DVD burner and image mounting program. Can also create ISO files from discs.
- 7-Zip - A free file archiver that can handle ISO images.
- File Roller - A Unix frontend for extracting ISO files.
- WinRAR - A free file archiver that can handle ISO images.
- MDF file format (.mdf)
- MDS file format (.mds)