Tag: Virtual drive

An ISO image is a single file that images an entire (usually optical) disc – a CD or a DVD. They’re often used for software distributions or archives. Most CD authoring programs will happily accept them and burn them to disc – Ubuntu can even do this by simply right-clicking the file.

However, what happens if you just want a couple of files off the disc? Or haven’t got a spare blank?

It’s possible to mount the discs as virtual images, and navigate them as if they were sat in your CD drive – only far faster as you’re puttering about on your hard drive. You can also mount several of these at one time, rather like having many CD drives with discs in all attached to your PC at once. As long as you have the hard drive space to store these images (and that’s not a problem these days) it’s a great way to access data.

Now, in Windows there’s a great little tool for mounting an unmounting virtual drives which Microsoft dishes out for free. Why it’s not built into Windows (XP at least) I don’t know, but it’s only a tiny download and install. Don’t even think about trying to search for it on Microsoft’s download site – I couldn’t find it using the search box, though I think you may have some luck via the knowledge base. Just click here for version 2.1 for XP. If you’re using Vista, remove it and replace it with XP or Ubuntu. Trust me, your computer will thank you.

Under Ubuntu there are a few options. There’s the fancy-dan graphics version which involves manually creating mount points for future use… and the dead-simple right-click and mount ad-hoc version.

The former can be achieved with GMount ISO. Just use the apps manager or “sudo apt-get install gmountiso” at the command prompt. I did have a tinker with this the other day and it’s a nice front-end, but does involve some setup before you can get it to work.

I found the Nautilus Script from MundoGeek a lot simpler and effective. Install it, log out and back into Ubuntu and you’ll find a nice right-click context-sensitive option available to “Mount image”. To unmount you have to ensure you right click the original ISO image you mounted, and not the virtual mounted device itself. Other than that, no configuration.

Oh, and don’t forget in Ubuntu you can also mount ZIP and other archive files as virtual drives with a simple right-click. This makes manipulating files within them so much easier.