


To un-mount it, just right-click on it and select “Eject.” You can follow these steps to mount and un-mount ISO images as needed. Once the ISO file is downloaded to your computer, to mount it, it’s as simple as double-clicking on the file itself or right-clicking on the file and selecting “Mount.” Once it’s mounted, you’ll see a new drive appear under “This PC” inside File Explorer. In fact, these more recent versions of Windows make it extremely easy to mount a disc image file like this. The neat thing about Windows 8 and Windows 10 is that they came with native support for mounting an ISO, whereas previous versions of Windows requires third-party tools for mounting. You can also mount an ISO image and access it as a device - you could even mount it to a flash drive! How to mount an ISO image They can function sort of similar to a ZIP file in that you can open and copy the contents of the ISO image to another folder. It’s worth noting that ISO files can be manipulated a bit more than just burning them to a disc though.

So, when you go to burn the ISO image to a new blank CD-R or DVD-R, you really are getting an exact clone of the original disc, right down to the file system information. It even contains the binary image of the optical disc’s file system and is copied over exactly as it sits on the disc. They’re a sector-by-sector clone of the data on the original optical disc, and all of that data is actually stored inside a binary file. With that in mind, ISO images can be extremely large in file size. These ISO files are uncompressed and don’t contain any specific container format. It even carries over the original file and volume label information. When you do this, you’re creating an identical copy of the original disc.

The most common uses for an ISO image is to burn the data to a blank CD-R or DVD-R. What are ISO files?Īs we mentioned, an ISO image is a snapshot of a CD or DVD. Follow along, and we’ll show you how you can mount an ISO and even take you through some of its applications. That’s just an example - there are many other uses for ISO images.
