I often find myself with proprietary disk image formats. For example if one person in my company uses Nero Burning Rom to create an ISO (or disk image) the file extension will be .NRG but if you are using another application like Roxio Easy CD Creator then the extension will be GI. Each application has its own extension.
If the image was an ISO you could use IMGBurn to burn an ISO file, but what do you do if it’s not? How do you burn the image onto your thumb drive on a friend’s computer without the software it was created with?
Well you can download a little 2.0MB file called ISO Buddy. ISOBuddy will help you burn your images. What it does is convert some of the most popular disk image extensions to be an ISO image. Once you have the image you can burn the ISO file easily.
The file formats that are supported by ISOBuddy are as follows: GI, NRG, CDI, MDF, IMG, B5I, B6I, DMG, PDI, BIN and CCD to ISO image.
After downloading and installing the application you will see a screen that looks like this:
To begin we will attempt to open an image file. I clicked on the Edit menu button and then chose to open an image file:
Go ahead and navigate to your disk image. We do not need to tell it what application created the image. It will show you on the Image Format Is: line. You can see that I used a .GI image from Roxio and ISOBuddy correctly identified it as a Roxio Global Image.
If there are multiple sessions on your CD or DVD we can choose which one we want to select. Most commercial disks will only have one session on them. Next we need to specify where we will be saving our new ISO image to. We do this by clicking on Edit ““> Save as and choosing a path and file name.
Now go ahead and hit the start button and your conversion will start. You can see the progress at the bottom of the interface like so:
When the conversion is complete you should see a message box like this pop up:
Go ahead and hit OK. Now that our conversion was successful we can burn our ISO or simply copy it elsewhere.
Let’s take a look at how to burn the converted ISO using ISOBuddy. Click on the burn button and you will have the option to burn the source image or the output image. You have to burn the target image so choose that one and then you can click on the burn button.
Clicking the burn button will bring up the built in burning utility like so:
Simply select the drive you want to use to burn the disk and hit the start button. You can optionally rescan for new drives if you had not plugged yours in when the initial scan occurred. You can also hit the settings check box to get this menu:
You can click through to the other tabs to see those options as well:
Click start and your image will be on its way to being burnt!
Do you have another free tool that helps to create and burn ISO files? We would love to hear about it in the comments!
Tagged: burning • cd-dvd tools • disk image • ISO
