How To Burn And Work With An ISO File Using PowerISO

There comes a time when you need to know certain basics about maintaining a PC. One of them is burning a image file, commonly known .IMG or .ISO files. Why? With the Internet constantly growing, so too is the online software market. Typically, you pay extra for a shipped DVD with your purchased software. However, this is usually an unreasonable €15-€20. So you skip that and download it. Someday, either you will buy a new PC or re-format it and will need to reinstall. One way to keep your software safe that you downloaded is to burn it to a disc. There are different types of discs that you burn. I am concerned with just two for now, Bootable and Non-Bootable. We will cover both burning the disc and mounting the disc.

Bootable

This is like your windows installation disc. Notice when you put it in the drive and start the computer, the computer recognizes it and starts the disc instead of your Operating System. (This is as long as your BIOS is set to check the DVD drive on boot. If not you can press choose F12 or F10 to choose where to boot from).

Non-Bootable

This is a disc that has no purpose or need to boot with the start up of a machine. It will usually contain just regular files.

Software Installations

Burning the Image File

For the rest of this article, we are interested in bootable image files. We will use the example of the free OS Ubuntu 9.10, since its just out and this week we will be doing a full post on installing Ubuntu for the novice. When you download the free Ubuntu Operating System from their website, it comes as a .ISO file like this: Now, in order to open and work with this kind of file, you need an Image File reader. My personal favorite is PowerISO. Its not free but the evaluation version does everything you need. You can download it here – [download id="6"]. If you want to read up on PowerISO, you can have a look at their site. There are many free versions of this kind of software like Imgburn. Google free ISO burners. I just like PowerISO because its simple and does all the work for me. To install PowerISO, just double click the downloaded file. If it asks to run then click run… Follow the usual prompts and accept the defaults. At the end it will ask you to restart. Unfortunately you must restart before going any further. Welcome back. OK. So, if you’ve already downloaded your Ubuntu Package you have an .ISO to play with already. Go find your download, double-click it to open it and PowerISO will pop open. Click Continue Evaluating and you will see the files from this image in front of you… Now to burn it to a disc, its really simple. Put a DVD in the tray and up on the top right there is a Burn button. Click that and follow the prompts. You’ll notice on the bottom left that there is an indicator letting you know that its a “Bootable Image”. Now you can restart your PC with that disc in place and choose to boot from the DVD drive when prompted. Ubuntu Live will start and you can safely play with Ubuntu without damaging your current OS. Just don’t hit Install until you understand what that does.

Using the Image File Without Burning It

Yes, you don’t have to waste a disc every time you want to use a .ISO or .IMG file. You can simply load it as if it were a real disc. Remember when you installed PowerISO earlier? And it asked you to reboot? Well, it reboots because it installed a virtual CD/DVD drive in your My Computer folder. Go have a look. To accomplish this, right click your .ISO image file and go to PowerISO > Mount On E: Drive (It may not be E: drive, substitute with your actual drive letter.) Now go to My Computer and its there. Open the drive like you would any folder and you have access to the files. That’s all there is to it. Have fun. This article was written in preparation for the upcoming article How to the new Ubuntu 9.10 for a novice. Before this article is published, there will be an intermediate article entitled How to install and use Virtual Box. Did you enjoy the tutorial? Please let me know.

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