How to create an ISO disc image

What is a disk image

A disc image is an ISO file that contains all the contents of the original media. There are other formats, but this one is the most popular.

The computer recognizes the virtual image just like a physical disk. Even if interconnected files were stored on the original media, they will work correctly as an image. Therefore, most often they create disc images with installation files for games, programs and operating systems.

Modern OS reads ISO files without additional software. On older operating systems, you can use utilities like Daemon Tools for this. You can also open an image and view its contents using a regular archiver.

Why create disk images

Let's say you bought a DVD / Blu-ray with a game or movie. Over time, scratches appear on it, which can lead to the loss of the recorded information. And the disc itself is easy to lose. In addition, it makes noise as it rotates in the drive, and the speed of reading data from it is lower than from the computer's memory. All these problems can be solved by creating a virtual disk image.

If the disc is copy-protected, most likely, it will not be able to create an image of it.

Another example: you have a Windows distribution disk. It can be used to install or restore an OS, but a flash drive is much better suited for these purposes. Moreover, many modern computers do not have floppy drives at all. But you can create a disk image and make it a bootable USB drive.

How to create a disk image in Windows

Ashampoo Burning Studio FREE is one of the most convenient utilities for creating disc images. Its interface is translated into Russian, it takes up little space and, moreover, is free. During installation, the program asks for a license key, but you can get it by email after a quick account registration.

Immediately after launching the utility, select "Disk Image" → "Create Image". Then insert the physical disk into the drive and wait for the program to recognize it, then click "Next". Then select the folder where the image will be created and select the ISO format. Click "Next" again and wait for the copy to complete.

The disk image will appear in the location you specified in the computer memory.

Ashampoo Burning Studio FREE →

If for some reason you are not satisfied with this utility, you can use similar free programs like BurnAware Free or CDBurnerXP.

How to create a disk image on macOS

On a Mac, this can be done in the standard Disk Utility, available in Finder → Applications → Utilities. After launching it, insert the required disk into the drive and click in the top menu "File" → "New image" → "Image from [your disk name]".

In the next window, enter the short name of the future image in Latin. Specify desktop as the destination and select “DVD / CD Master” format. After that click "Save" and wait for the copying to complete.

The created image will appear on the desktop and will have the CDR extension. If you plan to use it only on Mac, then you can leave this format as well. But for Windows computers to read it, you need to convert the CDR file to ISO.

To change the image format, run the Terminal utility. Enter the command


cd desktop

and press Enter. Then enter the second command


hdiutil makehybrid -iso -joliet -o [name 1].iso [name 2].cdr

having previously replaced [name 1] and [name 2] with the names of the future ISO file and the already created CDR file, respectively. Then press Enter again - after a while the ISO image will appear on the desktop.

Let's say you first created a CDR file named olddisk. Then we choose for the future ISO image, for example, the name newdisk. As a result, the commands for our case will look like this: