An ISO file or an ISO image is a perfect representation of all file and folders contained in a CD /DVD. Windows software: 7-zip and Infra recorder can be used to read and burn ISO images on Windows, respectively.Most operating system and programs especially large one comes in an ISO format containing all required installation files. You can mount it to a directory using: mount -o loop,offset=307200 imagename.nrg /mount-point
dmg disk image to a directory, you need to install the hfsplus package, then mount it with mount -o loop -t hfs image.dmg /mnt/somewhere dmg image from a HFS formatted CD or hard drive partition: dd if="your input file" of=image.dmg
It is widely used for software distribution means, and is actually the raw image of a HFS filesystem, that's why in Mac OS X it is mounted as a drive.ĭMG disk images have the MIME type application/x-apple-diskimage You can burn a CD using the information from the cue file with cdrdao: cdrdao write -speed 4 -device 0,1,0 example.cueĪ DMG file is an Apple Disk Image, a popular format on Mac OS X. bin images come with a cue file, describing the layout of CD tracks. This extension is also commonly used for hard disk images. This process will copy ANYTHING on the disc, so it is useful for exotic discs (multiple tracks, mixed track type Audio+Data or Data+Audio) and for non-PC CDs (PSX, VCD, MAC). BIN file, but more stuff is copied and the resulting file will be bigger. Once again, each sector is converted to digital data in the.
img files are images extracted in pure RAW format.įor a CD, that is 2352 bytes sectors, the full CD sector content: user data, sector header, error correction codes (ECC) and error detection codes (EDC). ISO images have the MIME type application/x-iso-image See ManipulatingISOs for info on manipulating ISO disk images. You can create, open and mount ISO images using CD and DVD applications. It is commonly used fir the distribution of Linux and LiveCDs. These properties make it an attractive alternative to physical data storage device for the distribution of software which requires this additional information as it is simple to retrieve over the Internet. All of this information is contained in a single file.
More loosely, it refers to any optical disk image.Īs 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). a USB keydrive).Īn ISO image (.iso) is an informal term for a disk image of an ISO 9660 FileSystem. It can also reduce bulk when one wishes to carry the contents of the CD along with oneself: one can store disk images to a relatively lightweight and bootable storage device which has a higher storage capacity than that of a CD (i.e. This can prevent the CD from getting burned or damaged. They are commonly used to distribute Live CDs.Īnother common use is to provide virtual disk drive space to be used by SystemVirtualization. The term has been generalized to cover any such file, whether taken from an actual physical storage device or not.Ī common use of disk images is for remote distribution of software such as Linux distributions: installation CD/DVDs can be recorded as disk image files, transferred over the Internet, and the contents of the original disk(s) duplicated exactly by end users with their own CD/DVD drives. Translation(s): Deutsch - English - Français - Italiano - РусскийĪ disk image is a computer file containing the complete contents and structure of a data storage device.