How To Open ISO Image

April 28, 2009 by  

An ISO archive is what’s called a disc backup – an exact copy of a CD or a DVD disc. ISO archives are typically created as CD/DVD backups, but they can also be made “from scratch” using a specialized editor like WinISO. An ISO image can only store a single track of data, so it doesn’t work for music CDs and a few more arcane CD/DVD types.

It may help to think of the .iso archive like a kind of archive because it usually contains a number of files and folders. However, unlike general purpose archives (e.g. ZIP or RAR), the ISO format stores everything in uncompressed form. Some commercial disc image formats like UIF file and .daa format also support file compression.

To extract an ISO archive you will need to install one of the many ISO file tools. There’s a multitude of applications that can open the ISO images, but most of them are either very expensive or simply lack any defining traits that would let you make an informed choice. So which one should you pick? Depending on your goal, there are two applications that I would recommend.

First, if you only need to open the archive, use 7-zip. It’s a free open-source archiver that can open ISO DVD images. It will let you extract the disc archive, but that’s it – 7-zip can’t burn, mount or create new .iso archives. It’s a neat no-frills tool and it is available for both Windows and Unix-based systems.

If you need a bit more features you should probably invest in a fully-fetured ISO file software like PowerISO. Yes, it’s shareware, but it will let you do nearly anything you want with an ISO or .uif files – extract it, modify, mount it in a virtual drive, convert to a different format, and burn to a real disc. PowerISO only supports Windows, though.

To summarize, ISO is a widely known, open CD archive file that is supported by most CD applications. Some general-purpose archivers can also extract .iso images, but they generally can’t do anything else with them.

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Comments

6 Responses to “How To Open ISO Image”

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