Mounting an iso disc image (windows only for XP to Windows 7)

An ISO image is an archive file of an optical disc, a type of disk image, composed of the data contents of every written sector of an optical disc, including the optical disc file system.

ISO image files often have a file extension of .iso. The name ISO is taken from the ISO 9660 file system used with CD-ROM media, but what is known as an ISO image might also contain a UDF (ISO/IEC 13346) file system or a DVD or Blu-ray Disc (BD) image.I previously had indicated "Backing up a video DVD to an ISO file". So the question now is, ok so now have an iso file of the disc but can you use it without writing it to a DVD/CD.


One of the reasons you may want to do this is you may have downloaded a data ISO file that is larger than what your DVD drive can write. The term we use to use this ISO file is called "mounting" the iso image as a virtual drive.

Windows 8 has this facility built in. 

I recommend that you should install the virtual CD emulator software WinCDEmu. Its a free utility that does the job and it works on 32-bit and 64-bit Windows versions from XP to Windows 7.

WinCDEmu has a tutorial "How to Mount an ISO File Using WinCDEmu", so I'll briefly describe the steps using this utility.

1. Open the folder containing the image file:
2. Double-click at the image. Alternatively, you can right-click and select "Select drive letter & mount" from the context menu.
3. Click at the OK button or press enter. If you don't want to see this dialog every time you mount an image, set the "Manage drive letters automatically" checkbox.
4. A new virtual drive will appear among all other drives in the "computer" folder:
5. You can use the virtual drive the same way as you would use a "real" optical disc - browse its contents, open files, start programs.
6. Once you are done with the image, right-click on the virtual drive and select "Eject":
7. You can alternatively unmount the image by double-clicking at the image file again.