What does a ISO mean when you are downloading a file?

Answer 1

Iso is "An ISO image (.iso) is an informal term for a disk image of an ISO 9660 file system. More loosely, it refers to any optical disk image, even a UDF image.

As is typical for disk images, in addition to the data files that are contained in the ISO image, it also contains all the filesystem metadata (boot code, structures, and attributes). All of this information is contained in a single file. These properties make it an attractive alternative to physical media for the distribution of software that requires this additional information as it is simple to retrieve over the Internet.

Some of the common uses include the distribution of operating systems, such as Linux or BSD systems, and LiveCDs.

Most CD/DVD authoring utilities can deal with ISO images: Producing them either by copying the data from existing media or generating new ones from existing files, or using them to create a copy on physical media.

Most operating systems (including Mac OS, BSD, Linux, and Windows, with third-party tools) allow these images to be mounted as if they were physical disks, making them somewhat useful as a universal archive format.

Console emulators, such as ePSXe, and many other emulators that read from CD/DVD, are able to run ISO/BIN (and other similar formats) instead of running directly from the CD drive. Better performance is achieved by running an ISO since there is no waiting for the drive to be ready and the hard drive I/O speed is many times faster than the CD/DVD drive.

A copy of CD contents, stored as an .iso file, is made this way: the ripper searches for the sectors of the CD that have been used, say 251,000 for instance (there are 330,000 sectors on a 74 min CD and 360,000 sectors on an 80 min CD). Each sector is copied to the .ISO file, one by one. For CDs each sector is 2048 bytes, the .ISO file should then be of size 251,000 x 2048 = 514,408,000 bytes.

Nero .NRG files are .ISO files plus a small file header."
- from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_image

Answer 2

ISO Stands for " International Standards Organization, responsible for the ISO 9000 and other international quality standards".

In case of files an ISO image (.iso) is an informal term for a disk image of an ISO 9660 file system. More loosely, it refers to any optical disk image, even a UDF image.

As is typical for disk images, in addition to the data files that are contained in the ISO image, it also contains all the file-system meta-data (boot code, structures, and attributes). All of this information is contained in a single file. These properties make it an attractive alternative to physical media for the distribution of software that requires this additional information as it is simple to retrieve over the Internet. A copy of CD contents, stored as an .iso file, is made this way: the ripper searches for the sectors of the CD that have been used, say 251,000 for instance (there are 330,000 sectors on a 74 min CD and 360,000 sectors on an 80 min CD). Each sector is copied to the .ISO file, one by one. For CDs each sector is 2048 bytes, the .ISO file should then be of size 251,000 x 2048 = 514,408,000 bytes.

Answer 3

In laymans terms it is one file which is an exact image of software. As an example if you were to simply copy the contents of your XP disk onto your hard drive, you will get & see a load of separate folders & files etc. on your hard drive, but if you were to rip it to your hard drive as an ISO file you would get a file which was an exact image of the XP disk.

Answer 4

International Organization for Standardization

Answer 5

It is a CD or DVD image file. It has to be burned to a CD or DVD before you can use it. There are some free tools you can burn it with but the trial version of Nero will do it (it's also easier), if it is a bootable image, make sure you set Nero to burn it as a bootable disc, otherwise, you will have just wasted the time it took to burn.

Answer 6

its an Image of an entire CD... so basically its the whole CD in a file.... you'll need Nero or some other program to burn it into a cd again.

Answer 7

Try here: http://www.wotsit.org/download.asp?f=iso9660 - it's a CD writing standard.