Why are we discussing a world body in a tech site? It’s because they lend their name to a well known file format too.

The ISO file (.iso) is just an archive file format of an optical disk. It can be said to be an exact clone of a file system because it’s a byte for byte copy of a disk with all of its data and metadata. It’s a popular format for downloads and transport over the internet. Anyone who has downloaded a game, an OS like a Linux distro, or an OS update would know them by sight. Also, being an open standard format along with another called UDF it’s supported by all optical disc software.

ISO is not the only one of its kind. There are others, each created by a disk manufacturer and his competitor. Some others you may have come across include – img, bin, mdf, mds etc.

So how does one deal with these ISO files? There are several easy ways :

• You can burn them directly to a disk.
• You can open them like an archive (remember they are uncompressed archives) using archive tools like WinRAR.
• You can mount them and treat it like a virtual drive.

Using widely available tools called free virtual drive software or Disk Emulators, it’s easy to mount an ISO file (or a disk for that matter) and use it as one would with a disk loaded in the CD tray.

Let’s load with three simple and free virtual drive tools.

Virtual CloneDrive

Virtual CloneDrive is a light 1.5 MB download which supports all common image formats such as ISO, BIN, IMG, CCD, UDF, DVD etc.

Mounting an image file is as simple as double clicking it or selecting it with a browse from the system tray. Virtual CloneDrive can mount up to 15 virtual drives at the same time.

Virtual CloneDrive is supported by Windows 98/98SE/ME/2000/XP/XP64/Vista/Vista64.

Note: During the installation an alert that Virtual CloneDrive has not passed the Windows Driver Signature Test and the Windows Logo Test crops up. Ignore and continue with the installation.

MagicDisc

MagicDisc is another light free virtual drive tool, downloading at 1.3MB. MagicDisc supports a large number of image formats like –

BIN, IMA/IMG, CIF, NRG, IMG/CCD, MDF/MDS, VCD, VaporCD, P01/MD1/XA, VC4/000, VDI, C2D, BWI/BWT, CDI, TAO/DAO and PDI.

MagicDisc allows for the creation of 15 virtual drives and can also mount images on a networked machine. Mounting images is easy as the program also comes with an automatic image detection engine. MagicDisc can be set to auto-mount images after a reboot.

MagicDisc also comes bundled with a lot of other features like –

• It can make ISO images from a physical disk.
• It has the ability to compress and encrypt ISO files.
• It features an interface that can decompress UIF images to ISO format.

MagicDisc (v2.7.106) is supported by Windows 98/98SE/ME/2000/XP /Vista/7.

DAEMON Tools Lite

DAEMON Tools Lite is the bulkiest of the trio with a 7.3MB download size. It is free for personal use. DAEMON Tools Lite supports a large number of image formats like –

b5t (BlindWrite images)/b6t (BlindWrite images)/bwt (BlindRead images)/ccd (CloneCD images)/cdi (DiscJuggler images)/cue (Cue sheets)/ iso (Standard ISO images)/mds (Media Descriptor Files)/nrg (Nero images)/ pdi (Instant CD/DVD images)/ isz (Compressed ISO images).

DAEMON Tools Lite gives us four virtual drives to work with. The image files can be mounted from the tray icon with a right or a left click. An image catalog saves a record of all image files mounted.

Also, the DAEMON Tools Panel gives a convenient interface to all functions of DAEMON Tools.

The Mount’n'Drive Manager bookmarks all your image files to give one touch access to mount and use them. The manager handles all mounting and un-mounting functions of the image files.

The Disc Imaging utility is a handy for creating image files in MDS or ISO format from physical disks. The data can also be compressed or encrypted with a password.

The program’s settings also lists a host of functions like auto-mounting, blocking un-mounting while image is in use, hot key settings, association settings with image formats and an Advanced Tab which handles copy protection features.

DAEMON Tools Lite (v4.30.4) is supported by Windows 98/98SE/ME/2000/XP /Vista/7.

Any of these three free virtual drive tools can stand up to the task of handling virtual disk jobs.We have previously featured a few other image mounting software’s on these posts…

How To Rip & Mount Multiple ISO Images Easily
Mount Zip Files, CD/DVD Images & Encrypt Folders
Mount CD or DVD Image Files Virtually Using A Portable App

Which one is your pick? Let us know about your favorite tools to mount disks and ISO images.

Image Credit: bobbigmac

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• AcetoneISO – Easy ISO Manager for Linux (5)
• Mount CD or DVD Image Files Virtually Using A Portable App (19)
• How To Rip & Mount Multiple ISO Images Easily (Windows) (12)
• How to Backup CD/DVDs to PC and Play them From Backup (10)
• Test Drive Linux Operating Systems with VirtualBox (7)

AcetoneISO is a feature-rich and complete software application to manage CD/DVD images in your Linux system. It runs the poweful fuseiso in the backend and provides a very user-friendly frontend for its users to handle the image file easily. If you have tried and used fuseiso before, you will know that it supports a large variety of CD/DVD images, including ISO, BIN, NRG, MDF and IMG, which in turn makes AcetoneISO a versatile and powerful tool.

Installation

AcetoneISO is found in the repository of all Linux distro, so it can be easily installed via the respective APT manager. Alternatively, you can also download the installation package for your distro.

When you first run AceToneISO, it will run you through the configuration process and help you to set up the environment for you to work in. There are some options that you are required to configure, including the ISO settings, selecting the default media player application, the file manager to use, and the storage directory.

To mount a CD/DVD image, you just have to select the “Open Image” option in the File menu. It will automatically mount the selected ISO file to the Virtual Drive folder in your Home directory. To unmount, simply highlight the respective file entry in AcetoneISO and click the unmount button.

Here is a warning: while testing the unmount feature in Ubuntu, I have found that I am unable to unmount the image within Nautilus. The only way to unmount the image is to use the unmount button in the AcetoneISO application. Some of you might be annoyed by this, but that is how it works.

Other than the default mounting and unmounting of image files, AcetoneISO also comes with other functionality to allow you to edit and manage your image files. Here are some of them:

Image conversion (with PowerISO)

AcetoneISO makes use of the great functionality found in PowerISO (free for Linux users) to provide some of the useful image conversion features to its users. You can now use it to convert image to ISO, convert Mac OS image (DMG file), extract image content to a folder (without mounting), generate ISO from CD/DVD and even create a ISO from folder(s).

Using the image conversion features require you to install PowerISO in your system. If you have not installed PowerISO, AcetoneISo will prompt you about it and help you to download and install.

Utilities

The Utilities menu comes with several functions such as mounting your image in a specified folder, generate the Md5-sum of the image, extract the boot image or even generate Cue for BIN/IMG images.

Archive manager

The archive manager feature is one powerful function in AcetoneISO. It allows you to split the image into several volumes (best used when the file size is too big), compress images, encrypt the images or even extract a RAR password-protected ISO (you will need to have the password before you can extract).

Working with Video/Audio

AcetoneISO can also be used to download, extract, convert video and audio component of an image. You can use it to rip a DVD (or generic video) to a xVid avi video file and convert a FLV (YouTube format) file to AVI. Better still, you can download YouTube and Metacafe videos right within the AcetoneISO application. Once you have downloaded the video, you can also extract the audio component from the video file (under the Audio menu). On a side note, you may also convert online video to mp3 audio using VidToMP3.

I am not sure how often you would have to deal with ISO or various image files, but when you do (and you are a Linux user), I am sure that AcetoneISO is the only tool you need to get everything done. It may not be the best yet, but it is getting close.

What other tools do you use to manage your image file in Linux? Shout out in the comments!

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• Mount CD or DVD Image Files Virtually Using A Portable App (19)
• How To Rip & Mount Multiple ISO Images Easily (Windows) (12)
• How to Backup CD/DVDs to PC and Play them From Backup (10)
• 3 Simple Free Virtual Drive Tools to Mount Disks & ISO Images (37)
• Mount Zip Files, CD/DVD Images & Encrypt Folders (10)

In case you’re one of the readers who don’t know what an ISO image is, it’s an archive file, a bit like ZIP or RAR, but it’s uncompressed. In order to open and read the ISO archive it needs to be mounted.

Now with ISODisk I can mount my ISO images from the network as a drive letter. I can share them out over the network with others or run them locally on a machine without having to burn the image.

I know you are saying to yourself that lots of programs can mount ISO’s to your Windows machine, and almost every other application can rip ISO’s now. How is this application different?

I am glad you asked!

ISODisk stands out in my book because it will let mount multiple iso images on the same machine. So if I have 10 images I am going to need access to, I can load ISODisk and mount all my images and share them out. Now I have full access to all of them from any networked machine!

Let’s take a look at ISODisk.

You first go to ISODisk and download the 52KB installer. After it is installed you will need to reboot to get the CD driver mojo working. After you reboot, fire up ISODisk or simply right click on a ISO image.

This is the screen you will see on startup.

And this tab allows you to easily rip a CD to an ISO.

Let’s take a look at how easy it is to mount an image. I click on the Mount ISO Image as Visual Disk and hit the folder icon and browse for my ISO. I can also right click on an ISO anywhere on my network and mount it like so:

I choose my XP SP3 made from Nlite and right clicked choosing the new context menu option – Load into new emulated drive. My file was on the F:\ drive of it’s local machine so it made me an F:\ drive with my files in it.

Within seconds I had this pop up and it was ready to install!

And if I browse on over to My Computer I have a new F:\ drive as you can see below:

Notice that it comes up as a CD-Drive. This is awesome for some programs that require you to have the disk in the drive.

Now let’s take a look at how ridiculously easy it is to rip a CD (or rip multiple CDs) to a ISO using our free little application.

We click back on over to the Create ISO Image from CD-Rom tab and choose the drive from the drop down menu. When you made your selection hit the floppy disk icon and select a location to save your ISO.

Type in the ISO’s new file name and hit Open. It will begin to rip it. And that’s it! Easy as 1-2-3!

Do you have a favorite ISO tool that you would like to share with us? Maybe some other app to multiple ISO images or rip CDs? Put us on in the comments guys and gals!

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• How to Backup CD/DVDs to PC and Play them From Backup (10)
• AcetoneISO – Easy ISO Manager for Linux (5)
• 10 Cool Linux Apps You Maybe Didn’t Know About (25)
• The Best, Free Alternatives to Nero CD/DVD Burner (244)
• Mount Zip Files, CD/DVD Images & Encrypt Folders (10)

However, sometimes it may be inconvenient or impossible to burn a physical disk. There are a number of programs that will allow you to mount disk images files virtually as CD or DVD devices without having to burn them to physical disks (such as Pismo File Mount).

Unfortunately, most of these programs require the installation of drivers, creation of registry entries, and often ask you to reboot the machine. Such requirements make it difficult to use them as portable apps on a USB drive.

The Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel by Microsoft is the perfect solution for mounting disk images from a portable USB drive.

To use the Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel:

• Download the Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel v2.0.1.1
• Extract the contents of the self-extracting excecutable onto your portable drive. Be sure that there are no spaces in the path to the directory you create (i.e. extract into a directory called X:\PortableApps\VCDRom, not X:\PortableApps\Virtual CD ROM). Otherwise, you will encounter problems later.
• Launch the VCdControlTool.exe program



• Click the Driver Control … button



• Click the Install Driver … button
• Browse to the location of where you extracted the Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel files, and use the VCdRom.sys driver file.
• Click the Start button.
• Click the OK button.
• Click the Add Drive button. You should see a new drive letter appear in the Virtual CDRom Control Panel window.
• Click the Mount button.
• Navigate to the location of your disk image file (.iso, .udf, .cdfs, .jo, and .rock files are supported) and open it.

The disk image is now mounted on the new drive letter that was created. To restore the system to its original state:

• Click the Eject button.
• Select the drive(s) that were added, in the Virtual CDRom Control Panel window.
• Click the Remove Drive button.
• Click the Driver Control … button.
• Click the Stop button.
• Click the Remove Driver button.
• Click the OK button.

At a mere 32.5KB, the Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel is extremely small and is very fast. It works on Windows XP and should also work on Vista if launched as the Administrator. If you keep disk images on your portable drive, you’ll definitely want to check it out.

Do you maintain disk images on your portable drive? What tool(s) do you utilize to use your images?

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• How to Backup CD/DVDs to PC and Play them From Backup (10)
• AcetoneISO – Easy ISO Manager for Linux (5)
• Virtualization-Free In-Windows Linux Installation (15)
• Quick Overview: Free Media Players (17)
• Put your Life On a USB Stick [Linux] (8)

You can easily install any of these apps using the ‘Add/Remove Applications’ from the upper panel.

1. Midori

Midori is a web browser that uses the well-known WebKit rendering engine, providing quite a speed bump from Firefox and standards complying page rendering. Midori is currently packaged into Xubuntu and features include tabs, bookmarks and customizable search engine box. The browser is extensible via Javascript.

2. gDesklets

gDesklets is a platform for widgets, tiny applets sitting on your desktop in a symbiotic relationship of eye candy and usefulness. You can populate your desktop with status meters, icon bars, weather sensors and news tickers.

I managed to configure gDesklets to emulate the OS X Dashboard feature in addition to the standard placement on the desktop.

3. AcidRip

AcidRip is a GTK application for ripping and encoding DVD’s. It neatly wraps MPlayer and MEncoder, which I think is pretty handy, seeing as MPlayer is by far the best bit of video playing kit around for Linux.

As well as creating a simple Graphical Interface for those nervous of the MEncoders command line interface, it also automates the entire process.

4. Cheese Webcam Booth

Cheese is a Photobooth-inspired GNOME application for taking pictures and videos from a webcam. It also includes fancy graphical effects based on the gstreamer-backend.

5. Gmount-iso

Gmount-iso is a small tool written using PyGTK and Glade. It allows you to easily mount your CD images.

6. KGRUBEditor

A tool to view and edit the menu.lst file of the GRUB boot manager. It offers many features and it is the perfect solution for those who want to change the way GRUB works, without messing with the menu.lst file.

7. Flickr Uploader

Postr is a small app that lets you upload photographs to Flickr, with tight integration into the GNOME desktop.

8. DOS Emulator

DOSEMU stands for DOS Emulation, and allows you to run DOS and many DOS programs, including many DPMI applications such as DOOM and Windows 3.1, under Linux.

Features include:

• word size and addressing modes of the iAPX86 processor family’s “real mode,” while still running within the full protected mode environment
• simulate a hardware environment over which DOS programs are accustomed to having control.
• provides DOS services through native Linux services; dosemu can provide a virtual hard disk drive which is actually a Linux directory hierarchy.

9. E-book reader

FBReader is an e-book reader with a lot of great features:

• supports several open e-book formats: fb2, html, chm, plucker, palmdoc, ztxt, tcr (psion text), rtf, oeb, openreader, non-DRM’ed mobipocket, plain text, epub
• reads directly from tar, zip, gzip, bzip2 archives (you can have several books in one archive)
• supports a structured view of your e-book collection
• automatically determines encodings
• automatically generates a table of contents
• keeps the last open book and the last read positions for all open books between runs
• automatic hyphenation (patterns for several languages are included)

10. HomeBank

HomeBank is a fast, simple and easy to use program to manage your bank accounts. It differs from gnucash for the better look and feel, and for the faster start-up speed. It has a lot of features such as easy analysis with graphical charts (statistics, budget, overdrawn, car cost), multi-accounts support, budget management, reminders, import from OFX/QFX-CSV files, visual status of operations. It is based on GTK2.

Let’s hear some other interesting, less-known Linux apps in the comments!

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• How To Rip & Mount Multiple ISO Images Easily (Windows) (12)
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FormatFactory is one such tool that can assist you in most of your media conversion needs.

FormatFactory is a multifunctional media converter that supports:

Video Conversion:
From all formats to MP4/3GP/MPG/AVI/WMV/FLV/SWF.

Audio Conversion:
From all formats to MP3/WMA/MMF/AMR/OGG/M4A/WAV.

Image Conversion:
From all to JPG/BMP/PNG/TIF/ICO/PCX/TGA.

Using FormatFactory you can not only convert between all the various formats but you can also perform certain other functions like reducing multimedia file sizes. This can be done by shortening the video/audio (by changing the duration) or by changing the quality with which you want to encode/convert.

You can also attempt to repair damaged audio and video files that just won’t play in your players.

FormatFactory has a special section for converting media files specially for your portable players. FormatFactory allows you to convert your media files to formats supported by your iPod, iPhone, Zune, PSP, BlackBerry and 3GP for supported devices

Last but not least you can use it to rip CD/DVDs to video files or convert them to ISO images.

Usage:

• 1. Download and complete the simple installation.
• 2. Choose the category and file format you want to convert to from the side bar.
• 3. Add in the desired files. Optionally you can change the output settings (click on output settings).

• 4. Once you have them all queued up hit the start button.

• You can also play with the options to tweak the overall settings and output folder for all your conversions.

Let us know what you think of FormatFactory in the comments. Do you have another preferred program for your media file conversion needs?

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• An Introduction To Codecs, Converters and Rippers (19)
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However, it’s much easier to transfer data from a hard drive, to date the capacity is much bigger, and when dealing with a mass of data, hard drives are of course cheaper, way faster and much more convenient to use for backups.

Now, even if you don’t make backups to CD or DVD, you probably own commercial discs, be it music, movies or programs you bought. If you don’t want to lose them due to “natural decay”, you will have to prepare a backup. Please mind that this is not an instruction to circumvent copy protection. In case you are dealing with copy protected media, you’d best learn how to treat them to achieve maximal lifetime. There is a very good article about CD and DVD Lifetime and Maintenance on Techworld. And to recover an already broken CD or DVD, you should refer to Bill’s recent article Free CD/DVD File Recovery Tool – CD Recovery Toolbox.

So how do you create a backup?

Most CD/DVD burners can save ISO files. Back in February Shankar wrote a great article introducing The Best, Free Alternatives to Nero CD/DVD Burner. Another great tool to extract ISO images from CDs or DVDs, is DuBaron’s open source CD2ISO. The tool does not require an installation, simply run the EXE file, select a drive and a target and go. CD2ISO does not read copy protected discs or audio CDs because it relies on a valid file system.

As you see, creating the backup is easy. And once you have it on your hard drive you can burn it to a fresh disc anytime. But why bother when you can read the backup directly from your hard disk!

Playback CD or DVD on your PC from Backup

Dolly, the first mammalian clone, has inspired the name and logo of SlySoft’s Virtual CloneDrive. With CloneDrive you can mount a virtual drive to playback CD or DVD backups in ISO, DUE, BIN, CCD, DVD, IMG or UDF format. The program supports up to eight virtual drives and it’s very easy to use.

After installation the tool appears as Elaborate Bytes folder in your Windows programs list. Open the Virtual CloneDrive menu and select how many drives you wish to mount. Check “virtual sheep” for the sheep head logo to appear as the drive symbol, to better distinguish the virtual from your regular drives.

To mount a CD image you can do two things. Either right-click the backup file and select >Open With >Mount Files with Virtual CloneDrive or right-click one of the virtual drives, select >Virtual CloneDrive and >Mount… from the menu, then browse for your backup file. Wait for a few seconds, then proceed as you would after loading a regular disc.

The advantages of using a virtual drive are manifold:
1. quick access to backed up CDs or DVDs
2. no need to carry discs
3. conserve your CD/DVD drive
4. less noise (especially on laptops)
5. less energy use

What is your experience with the durability of CDs and DVDs? Are you prepared to lose the first CDs you bought back in the 80’s?

(By) Tina is a regular MUO author. In her offline life she’s a PhD student interested in unraveling signaling events that determine cartilage and bone development.

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• Mount CD or DVD Image Files Virtually Using A Portable App (19)
• How To Rip & Mount Multiple ISO Images Easily (Windows) (12)
• AcetoneISO – Easy ISO Manager for Linux (5)
• Virtualization-Free In-Windows Linux Installation (15)
• Using Keepass to Secure Your Online Accounts (19)