The ISO file

Alot of people come across this type of file called the iso file. Many of your are probably wondering what the heck it is. Firstly ISO stands for internatiional organization of stadardization. But for our purposes it's better known as an image file. More specifically an exact image of a cd rom.


You can create an exact image of a cd or even a dvd. Some of the uses of an ISO file include archiving cd roms or dvds onto a harddrive just in case the data gets lost, another use is to distribute cd's. There are many programs that one can use to read, extract and copy ISO's some of these programs include, power iso (.daa) and magic iso (.uif) both are commercially available and are excellent for burning, extracting and creating iso's. imgburn is a free software that is also good for isos.

Since an ISO is an exact image of a cd or dvd, you can technically run the data on an ISO without the actual disc, this process is called mounting image. It's as though you've got a virtual drive on your computer. Running a setup for a program using this method is often faster than running it from the cd itself , this is because the harddrive is quite often much faster than that cd rom.