what is an ISO image/file on a pc?

Answer 1

An ISO is an image of a disk.

In other words, imagine you had a CD with thousands of files on it and wanted to take them all off, but not clutter your hard drive with many files...

You could make an image of what is on the cdrom ( a picture of all the files on it, in just a single file, an image ) and then you can take the image and burn it to another CD, and when you burn it, it puts all the files in the image on the cd.

Answer 2

Hello,

(ANS) An ISO image is commonly associated with the distribution of the Linux operating system. There are many many different flavours & types of linux, these are distributed over the internet from various websites for free.

Typically you would download a linux ISO image file and then burn that ISO file onto a CD disk. The completed disk can then be used to install the actual linux operating system onto the hardware (PC or laptop,etc).

**NOTE: ISO stands for International Standards Organisation!

**ISO is just a recognised type or standard for image files.

**Generally an ISO image will plug & play itself (fit itself) to your hardware so you end up with a working operating system i.e. linux.

Hope that helps?

IR

Answer 3

ISO stands for International Standards Organization. An ISO image on a PC is an image of a CD. Rather than copy files or songs off of a CD you make a complete image of the disc. Any CD burner software that can read ISO images can then make an exact duplicate of the existing CD.

Most common use for ISO images in with a bootable CD, like an operating system install CD, because it is very difficult to reproduce a bootable CD unless you have an image file.

Bit of trivia: the name for bootable CD support is the "El Torito" standard.

Answer 4

An ISO file is a single file that holds the contents of a CD - e.g. an image of the CD.

Use software such as Daemon to use this on your PC, or CD Burning software such as Nero to turn it into an actual disk.

Answer 5

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 disc image, even a UDF image.

As is typical for disc 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, Mac OS X, BSD, Linux, and Windows with Microsoft Virtual CD-ROM panel) allow these images to be mounted as if they were physical discs, 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.

Answer 6

Ther's no ISO file type for images.But Famous image file types are JPEG, BMP ,PSD,CDR extentions.

The above image type has got different image .

Answer 7

Good info here.

http://kb.iu.edu/data/amxs.html