MakeUseOf » ISO

Mount ISO & IMG files With Furius Mount [Linux]

Justin Pot — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 19:01:15 +0000

Mount virtual disks quickly in Linux. With support for ISO, IMG, BIN, MDF and NRG files and a simple user interface, Furius is the go-to tool for Linux users wanting to mount a virtual file system.

ISO files, and their many brothers, serve a simple purpose – allowing you to store the entire contents of a CD or hard drive in a single file. This is useful when you’re downloading an operating system, or when you’re backing up your entire hard drive so you can restore it later. Sometimes though, you might want quick access to the files inside without burning the ISO to disk or restoring the environment to your hard drive.

That’s when “mounting” comes in. This allows you to browse the virtual file system from your computer directly. We’ve shown you 3 tools to mount disks as ISO images, but those programs were all for Windows. Macs mount such files by default, but Linux users need software for the job. That’s where Furius comes in. This simple software allows you to quickly create a mount point for a variety of virtual disks, including ISO files.

Using Furius

The main screen of Furius is simple and to the point:

Pick which file you want to mount, and where you want to mount it. Then click “mount“, and you’ve got access to the files inside your virtual filesystem. This is a great way to browse a full system backup or install packages from an ISO repository. Create a checksum file, if you want to ensure you’re looking at the right file. Most sites offering ISO downloads also offer a checksum; compare that one with Furius’ and you will know if you’ve got the right file.

The bottom half of the window shows you which ISO files you currently have mounted; you’ll find the mounted filesystems as a basic folder at the mountpoint you set:

Done with your mounted filesystem? Unmount it. Go back to your Furius window and click the “unmount” button, after highlighting the file you’d like to unmount.

Once you’ve done that, you’re done – the file is unmounted. You might run into problems if you’ve opened a file inside the mountpoint, so be sure to close everything before you unmount.

As you can tell, this program is simple to use. You can make it even simpler though, by setting it to mount any ISO file you open by default. Find instructions for that on the Furius website.

Install Furius

Ubuntu users can simply click here to install Furius.

Using a different Linux distro? Check your distro’s package manager, because Furius is probably there. If not, head to the Furius website to find downloads.

Conclusion

Increasingly, optical drives are becoming obsolete. Their digital versions, however, live on. Being able to access the file inside these digital representations of optical drives directly, without the need to use a consumable CD, is very nice. And Furius makes that easy.

What are you using Furius for? Is it useful for you, or do you know a better way of mounting such files? Share in the comments below. I’d love to join you for a conversation, as always.

Rip A DRM’d DVD Disk To ISO Format With BDlot DVD ISO Master [Windows]

Justin Pot — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 16:01:04 +0000

Watch everything on your favorite DVD, including special features and commentary, from a single file on your hard drive. With the right software you can overcome the file protections on your DVDs and watch them on your computer anytime.

BDlot DVD ISO Master is a free piece of software that does what very few free programs can do – bypass the various Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies used to stop people from ripping DVDs, including Disney’s infamously tricky protection.

Watching movies on a computer, especially a laptop, is convenient. Sometimes it’s not convenient to watch them from a DVD, though. Perhaps your laptop doesn’t have a DVD drive. Perhaps you’re about to travel and don’t want the clutter of a physical DVD along for the the trip. Whatever the reason, ripping your DVDs can make them easier to watch on the go.

We’ve shown you how to rip entire DVDs to your hard drive in the past, but that tutorial focused on ripping DVDs to video files. With BDlot DVD ISO Master you can easily create an ISO file containing all the information on a DVD, which can be watched on your computer or burned to a blank DVD as a backup.

A Brief Explanation

We all know what a DVD is – a disk with files on it. These disks have a variety of uses, but most DVDs people buy in stores are movies. So that’s clear, but what is an ISO? And what is DRM? Good questions.

An ISO file is, simply put, an exact copy of a DVD disk. This means that an ISO file from a ripped movie DVD includes not only the movie itself but also the menu and the special features. These files are a useful starting point if you want to burn DVDs, but can also be a great format from which to watch DVDs on your hard drive.

What is DRM? It’s basically software added to DVDs, and many other kinds of media, to make it harder to copy the contents. This is meant to stop piracy, but can also stop innocent people from watching a DVD they legally own from their hard drive. BDlot gets around this.

Using BDlot DVD ISO Master

So, with that cleared up, let’s take a look at BDlot. To begin, of course, you’ll need to download BDlot DVD ISO Master. This Windows program is easy to install, and once you get it running you’ll see a simple interface. The first thing you’ll want to do is choose your source and destination:

This is simple enough: pick the DVD you’re trying to rip as your source, then pick where the file should be made. Note that this file will be rather large – typically upwards of 5GB – so choose a hard drive with lots of space.

You can also pick which sorts of DRM protection you want to remove:

There’s nothing wrong with leaving everything checked, of course, and doing so makes it more likely that you can actually play the DVD later. Once you’re ready to rip, all you need to do is click the big blue button – that will start the process. It may take a few hours, but at the end, you’ll have a ready-to-play ISO.

A variety of video players can open ISO files; I recommend VLC which plays just about everything. Most media centers, including Boxee, can also open ISO files. Let us know any other programs you find that can open ISO files in the comments below.

Want to burn an ISO to DVD? This program supports that too; just enter the burn mode and get started. You’ll need a DVD burner, of course.

Supported DRM

So what DRM can this tool remove? Here is the official list:

CSS
CPRM
CPP
APSUOPs
ARccOS
Rip-Guard
Disney X protection

Conclusion

This is a great tool for ripping your DVD collection so you can watch it on the go. While it may not work for watching DVDs on portable devices like the iPad, it is great for those of us who want to watch our DVDs on our computers.

Do you have any similar tools to recommend? Share them in the comments below, along with any ripping tips or ISO playback tips.

Create Your Own Custom Linux Installation Disc With SUSE Studio

Danny Stieben — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 17:31:46 +0000

We all know that Linux is very flexible, and you can do so many things with it. One of its advantages is that it can run on virtually any hardware. Linux is also extremely modular, so parts can be added and removed as you please. In fact, it is this ability that makes Linux a great pick for many users, no matter what environment. It is also this principle of modularity that allows SUSE Studio to exist.

About

SUSE Studio is a website that takes the base of the latest versions of openSUSE or SUSE Enterprise (you can choose), and lets you customize a number of different aspects of your distro. It’s a very easy process. Just go through the screens, clicking on whatever you would like to add, change, or remove. There are actually a handful of things you can do that you might not have expected from a web service. When you finish with all the configuration, the service will build your very own custom ISO of openSUSE/SUSE Enterprise with all the settings that you chose.

Getting Started

To start off, you’ll need to sign in or create an account. You can also sign in using a different service (like Google), and it will automatically create an account on their server for you. These accounts are important because you’ll receive 4GB of free storage to be used for this service.

Steps

The next step is to choose what version of SUSE you would like to base your Linux installation disk off of. Currently the options are openSUSE 11.4, SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 SP1, and SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 SP4. If you do not have a specific need for either of the Enterprise versions, I suggest you select the openSUSE option.

In no time at all, you’ll be able to start customizing your distribution. First off is the software selection page, where you can choose to include certain software packages with your ISO so that you do not have to download and install it later.

This is a handy feature to customize your experience right from the start. Simply search for the packages you want and add them. You can also add additional repositories if you so desire or upload your own RPM files to include.

The Configuration tab lets you tweak a large amount of system settings such as locale, time zone, network settings, firewall settings, and users. You can also choose different appearances and logos from the Personalize section, change the default run level and add EULAs in the Startup section, and edit other server, desktop, and virtual machine related settings.

In the Files category, you can add any overlay files that you wish. These are applied after all packages are installed.

Finish With a Build

You can now build your “appliance” in the Build category and download when it is finished. Then simply burn the ISO onto a CD/DVD, USB stick, or try it out in a virtual machine. You can do whatever you want with that ISO file as you can with a more generic one.

Conclusion

SUSE Studio is an amazing tool for those who want to build custom ISOs for their own unique needs. I’ve heard a handful of people use this for everything from server setups to media centers and beyond. Only your imagination can come up with the perfect combination of packages and settings to make your Linux experience one of the best.

Do you think SUSE Studio is a great idea? Will you maybe try it out for your own needs or just to get a better experience with Linux? What else would you use it for? Let us know in the comments!

How To Create Disk Images & Mount Them On A Virtual Drive [Windows]

Jeffry Thurana — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 18:31:17 +0000

One of my acquaintances, who has just got his first personal computer, has a weird new hobby – buying and copying CDs and DVDs (music, applications, movies) to his laptop’s hard drive. His reason is that he wants to put his collection all in one place, and he has plenty of storage space to spare. But being a first time computer user, he used a bit of a strange way of doing it. He copied everything inside the discs and pasted them onto the hard drive.

The results were various. Some of the copy-paste attempts were successful while others failed. When he asked me for a solution, I told him that simply copying the contents might not work for some discs. A better way would be to record them as disk images and then mount them using a virtual drive.

Why Would Anybody Want To Create A Disk Image?

The first time I met the concept of a disk image was in the late 90′s when I unsuccessfully tried to play a computer game without the CD. Back in those days, many software makers required that the installation/data CD’s were to be present in the tray before the application could run. If you used many applications and each one of them required several CD’s, repeatedly inserting and changing those CD’s could become very annoying. It would be much better if users transformed those CD’s into disk images and mount them using virtual drives.

Another advantage of using a combination of disk images and virtual drives is the number of virtual drives you can use. While normal computer users would never install 20 optical disc drives on their CPU, anybody can easily set up 20 virtual drives on their system.

Then there’s the performance issue. Running mounted disk images is faster and less resource hungry than letting the system read everything from the physical disc. This method also means a longer battery life for mobile computer users. Converting physical discs into disk images also means that you can use the discs virtually from any computer that doesn’t have an optical drive such as small netbooks.

Last but not least, after copying the discs as images, you can safely store them away and prolong their lifetime.

Creating Disk Images

Even though there are downloadable disk images on the web (Ubuntu Installer being one of them), the most common way to acquire disk images is by converting the real CDs with the help of disk imaging application. Most CD/DVD burner apps can accomplish the task, but one of the simplest free disk image software solutions that I found is ISO Recorder. This app will give you right-click access to create images.

Downloading the tiny installer (less than 800KB) and installing the app will set you back only a few seconds.

After that, creating disk images is as simple as right clicking on the inserted real disc and choosing “Create image from CD/DVD“.

The next step is to choose the location to save the images.

The app will replicate the disc. The process could take some time, depending on the size of the disc and the speed of your system.

After the operation is completed, click the “Finish” button to exit ISO Recorder.

Repeat the process to create more disk images.

Adding Virtual Drives

To mount disk images, you’ll need to add/create virtual drives using virtual drive tools. One of the easiest tools you can try is Virtual Clone Drive.

During the setup, you can associate several disk image formats to be automatically opened with Virtual Clone Drive.

The app will act as if it is installing a new hardware, so your computer will ask for your confirmation whether or not you want to continue with the installation.

After installation, the app will quietly reside in the System Tray.

Clicking on it will open the “Settings” window. There are several things you can customize here, but I think the most important one is the option to set up how many virtual drives you want to add to your system.

After that, mounting the disk images to one of the available virtual drives is only a matter of right clicking on the disk images and choosing “Mount“.

Using a combination of disk images and virtual drives, you can create as many images as you want (provided you still have room on your hard drive), mount as many images as you need, and keep them open all the time if you want to.

Obviously, the two free disk image software tools mentioned above are not the only available options. There are many other alternatives you could try, including a couple that Tim recently highlighted. What are the disk imaging and/or virtual drive tools of your choice? Please share them using the comments section below.

3 Free Alternatives To DAEMON Tools For Mounting Image Files

Tim Brookes — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 01:31:07 +0000

The ability to use a virtual drive to mount optical media from a file will undoubtedly save you time and effort, but if you’re a Windows user then your operating system can’t do it without a helping hand.

For years DAEMON Tools has been regarded by many as ahead of its class in this field, but it is not without its rivals. If you’re searching for a decent alternative then we’ve got 3 hot tips right here.

If you’re using Linux then you can get better instructions here, these apps are Windows-only.

Do I Need A Virtual Drive?

You only really need a virtual drive if you want to mount image files. Image files are digital copies of optical media, such as CDs, DVDs and Blu-Ray discs. It is possible to rip the entire contents of a CD (or other optical media), and then mount it with image mounting software.

The software (in this case DAEMON Tools) installs a virtual optical drive on your PC, which functions exactly the same as a normal drive ““ only instead of physical media, you feed it image files. You can then access the image file as if you had put a disc into your computer. If you download software or applications and want to avoid burning the downloaded file to a CD, then you can simply mount your chosen software in the virtual drive.

You could even rip often used media so it’s that little bit easier to access. Using virtual drives in this way can vastly speed up your workflow, especially with multiple-disc installs.

DAEMON Tools Lite

There exists a free version of the commercial DAEMON Tools product line, DAEMON Tools Lite. This is the best alternative to the paid versions, with a few restrictions imposed over the pro edition. The interface is familiar and easy to use, and there’s plenty of power beneath the hood.

Not only will it mount a wide variety of familiar and obscure file types (.MDX, .MDS/.MDF, .ISO, .B5T, .B6T, .BWT, .CCD, .CDI, .CUE, .NRG, .PDI, .ISZ) but you can also have up to 4 simultaneous virtual drives (which should suffice for personal use).

DAEMON Tools Lite also includes the ability to make disc image files from your own optical media. As this is the free version, you can only rip to .MDS/*.MDF and .MDX.

Alternatives

Maybe you’ve tried DAEMON Tools, decided it’s not for you and fancy something else. You may also be one of the unlucky few who experience problems with the program, and need something a bit different.

Here are 3 good alternatives to DAEMON Tools that won’t cost you a penny.

WinCDEmu

The first on the list is the completely free and open source WinCDEmu. As there are no commercial versions of the software, the free version packs everything the developers could come up with into one cost-effective package.

Mountable images are limited to: .ISO, .CUE, .NRG, .MDS/.MDF, .CCD and .IMG. This isn’t quite as many as DAEMON Tools, but the major formats are fully supported. WinCDEmu completely integrates with Windows Explorer, allowing you to simply double-click a supported image file for it to be immediately mounted. You can then unmount the disc image using the right-click context menu from My Computer.

WinCDEmu should suffice for most common disk image tasks. What’s more its free and open source to boot.

Alcohol 52%

Brought to you by Alcohol Software, Alcohol 52% is the smaller, non-commercial edition of the popular Alcohol 120% image tool. It supports the mounting of common image file formats and a maximum of 6 virtual drives in this free edition.

Alcohol does not integrate with Explorer quite in the same way as WinCDEmu, instead you must add your image files to Alcohol first and then double-click to mount them.

This version is free for non-commercial and personal use only, otherwise you’ll need a licence. Don’t forget to uncheck that pesky Alcohol Soft Toolbar that’s bundled along!

Note: if you’ve been using Alcohol 120% and want to downgrade to this free version be sure to remove your old version first.

Virtual CloneDrive

We’ve mentioned it before, and for good reason. Virtual CloneDrive is a freeware image mounting tool with the usual support for common formats (including .ISO, .BIN and .CCD) and a whopping 8 virtual drives. You may get a Windows driver warning whilst installing, but soldier on and click Continue Anyway to proceed with the installation.

Once installed you can associate your image files with the program so that in future all it takes is a double-click to mount. Virtual CloneDrive is simple, cost-free and effective.

Conclusion

We’ve already covered a lot of optical media tools, but it’s always nice to have a selection. All of these programs should work on machines running the Windows XP, 2000, Vista and 7 operating systems. let us know if they work out better than DAEMON Tools for you.

Do you have any preferred image mounting software? Have your say in the comments.

Image credit: Shutterstock

How To Extract ISO Files With Linux

Tim Brookes — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 21:30:46 +0000

You’ve probably downloaded an image file before, and there’s a good chance it used the popular .ISO file extension. These (usually quite large) files are essentially digital optical media, and all files contained within that media are wrapped up into the .ISO archive.

Unlike Windows, Linux has built-in support for mounting and manipulating image files. This means you don’t necessarily need third party software in order to access .ISO archives and the files contained within.

There are in fact a couple of ways of going about this, so you can choose a method which suits you.

ISO ISO Baby

The image file format has been a popular way of distributing software online since broadband speeds allowed us to do so. Chances are you installed your Linux distribution using an .ISO file, possibly one you prepared in good old Windows.

The .ISO file format simply archives the contents of an optical media disc using the ISO 9660 file system. It is also possible for these images to use the UDF (Universal Disc Format) file system in some cases. The data within the archive is uncompressed, and an .ISO image can be made from any optical media ““- CD, DVD, HD-DVD (remember those?), BluRay and so on.

It is not possible to use the .ISO file format to create an image of an audio CD as these do not use a computer filesystem. In these cases .BIN/.CUE image combinations are often preferred.

If you want to gain access to the files within an .ISO archive, first you’re going to need to mount it. You can either opt for the command-line method or you can use a program with a graphical interface if you’re not fond of text-based commands.

Some distributions may have provided software so you can extract via the right click menu. Before starting out, find your .ISO image, right click and look for the Extract Here option. You might just be pleasantly surprised!

Extracting an .ISO Using the Command Line

This isn’t as hard as it sounds, it’s just a matter of getting the syntax right in the command. First you’ll need to create a folder in which to mount the image, open your command line editor and enter:

sudo mkdir /mnt/iso

Enter you password when asked, and your directory will be created. Now we can mount the file by typing:

sudo mount -o loop .iso /mnt/iso

Replace with the location of your .ISO file, for example I mounted a file in my Downloads folder using

sudo mount -o loop /home/tim/Downloads/image1.iso /mnt/iso

Now you can navigate to the folder you created and access the files within the .ISO. If you want to grab the whole lot via the command line, you can copy the contents of the folder by typing:

sudo cp -r /mnt/iso /home/tim/Documents

This command would copy the whole lot to a separate “iso” folder in my Documents folder. The

-r

option instructs the operation to copy recursively, which includes folder contents.

You don’t necessarily need to do this of course, as once you have mounted it you can use your file manager to pick and choose the bits you want.

Note: If the command used here to mount your .ISO fails, you might want to also try:

mount -o loop -t iso9660 .iso /mnt/iso

Extracting an .ISO Using Software

If the command line isn’t for you, there’s a couple of applications that mount and allow you to extract image files. They’re all free, as is the case with most Linux software.

Gmount-ISO

A simple graphical interface for the GTK+ environment that allows you to mount .ISO files in a directory of your choice. Input the path to your .ISO in the Image File field and the folder in which you’d like to display the contents in the Mount Point field.

Then simply click Mount and the contents of your image will appear in the directory that you specified.

Ubuntu and other distributions that use Synaptic can install via the command-line:

sudo apt-get install gmountiso

AcetoneISO

With support for a variety of image formats including .ISO, .BIN, .MDF and .NRG AcetoneISO is another powerful graphical interface for mounting and extracting.

AcetoneISO allows you to specify a folder in which your image files are located, or you can just choose Mount and point AcetoneISO to the right file.

Ubuntu and other distributions that use Synaptic can install via the command-line:

sudo apt-get install acetoneiso

Do you have any favourite image mounting programs? Do you use the command line method or a GUI? Let us know in the comments!

Use ISOBuddy To Convert A Disk Image To ISO & Then Burn

Karl L. Gechlik — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 18:31:50 +0000

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!

Combine Multiple ISO Files To Burn A Single Bootable ISO Image

Varun Kashyap — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 17:31:59 +0000

There are hundreds of Live CDs available on the Internet these days free of cost. Many of them are indispensable for a variety of purposes. I consistently find use of one or the other. You can have GParted for partitioning, Backtrack for Pen Testing, System Rescue CD as a rescue CD, CloneZilla to clone your hard disk, DBN to completely wipe off data of your hard drive and then there are hundreds of Linux distributions that you can find as a bootable CDs. Make a pick and you add another one to the stack of CDs.

While all these tools are fine and dandy, carrying a number of CD’s along is too much of a hassle. Add to that the fact that many of the above are considerably smaller than a CD’s 700MB capacity.

If you ever wondered how you could combine multiple ISO files and how to burn a single ISO image file onto DVD that could let you use all of them, the answer lies in this article. We are going to combine multiple ISO images and show you how to burn an ISO image file comprising all of them. The tool that I would be using is a shell script appropriately known as the “Multi CD”. You can download Multi CD here. The process of creating a composite image is not so straight forward, but not rocket science either. There are a few steps that you need to keep in mind, and I will try my best to go through all of them here.

First off you need to make sure that all the constituent ISO images are supported by Multi CD. There is a complete list that can be accessed here. As you browse through the list you will notice that most of them have rather simplified names as opposed to what you get when you download an image from the Internet. This is a requirement of the script and you would have to rename the iso files to match these file names. That should of course be no major problem at all – all you need to do is change something like “ubuntu-9.10-desktop-i386” to “ubuntu.iso“.

And while you are at the page, pay special attention to not only the names that you need to give the ISO files but also to any additional caveats that may be mentioned there. The entry for Linux Mint for example lists that it cannot be on the same DVD as Ubuntu. So now you must choose between Ubuntu and Linux Mint if you had both of them in your list of constituent CD images.

Next, download the tar ball from the downloads section and extract it to a folder. Now drop all the ISO images that you want to combine into the folder you just created so that the folder looks something like this:

Now its only a matter of executing the script. You would have to make it executable with a chmod +x and then execute it as:

cd
chmod +x multi.sh
sudo ./multi.sh

Provide the password at the prompt and MultiCD sets out to work. The result is a bootable ISO image that would allow you to use any of the constituent images that you dropped in the folder. Burn it to a CD/DVD and it’s ready for use!

There it is sitting in the same folder as multicd.iso.

Have you even attempted combine multiple ISO files into one before? Do you know of any other tools that can yield similar results with such ease on Windows? Let us know all about them in the comments.

How To Create Windows-Compatible ISO Disc Images on Mac OS X

Jackson Chung — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 19:30:20 +0000

I ran into this enigma a couple of days back. Here’s what happened: I needed to create a clone of a disc to be shared with friends and it had to be compatible with Windows (because it was a Windows-only disc anyway but that’s not the point). I knew for a fact that using Toast was a sure-fire way to create a clone of any discs. I began to do some research on Google, trying to find another method to create a Windows-compatible ISO disc image, without the use of any additional apps.

And guess what? Mac OS X does not disappoint. By combining the trusty Disk Utility and some black magic from Terminal, I was able to create an ISO on Mac OS X that works in both Mac and Windows. It’s actually pretty simple. Here’s how.

Insert the disc into the CD/DVD drive and launch Disk Utility. The disk will appear in the left column window. Click on it once so that its highlighted, as shown in the screenshot below.

Now that we have the source of the disc image selected, click on File->New->Disk Image from “insert name of source”. In the pop-up window which appears, select the Desktop as the destination just to make life a little simpler. Next, make sure that DVD/CD Master is selected as the Image Format — that ensures the contents of the disk are completely copied into a resultant .cdr image (Tip: keep the image’s name short and simple so that it can be easily reproduced).

Click on Save and the disc image creation process will begin, indicated by a progress window. Depending on how large the disc is, the amount of time that’s necessary varies.

When the cloning process is complete, check the Desktop and the .cdr image should be there. You can use this image on Macs, it works perfectly. However, to share it with Windows computers, we first need to convert it into a recognizable format. To do this, the help of Terminal is required.

Launch Terminal either by Spotlighting for it or directly double-clicking on the app in ~/Applications/Utilities/ and type in:

cd desktop

Then, enter this line of code to transform the .cdr to an ISO file:

hdiutil makehybrid -iso -joliet -o [filename].iso [filename].cdr

Substitute both instances of [filename] with the name of the .cdr image. As you can tell from the screenshot above, Terminal will create a new hybrid image. This image can be read in both Windows and Macs and uses ISO 9660 and HFS file systems.

So there you go. You can easily create cross-platform hybrid disc images with your Mac without the need for any additional applications. How neat is that? To mount the disk image in Mac, simply double-click on it. In Windows, CD/DVD mounting tools are required – Saikat featured a couple great tools and Jorge wrote about one which doesn’t require installation.

That’s just one of the few uses of Disk Utility. Jeffry used it to install Snow Leopard from his thumbdrive — check the article out, it’s really neat.

3 Simple Free Virtual Drive Tools to Mount Disks & ISO Images

Saikat Basu — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 18:01:36 +0000

ISO stands for the International Organization for Standardization. You wouldn’t know it but it’s one of the most powerful non-governmental organizations in the world. These are the guys who set the universal benchmarks known as ISO standards.

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