Mounting an ISO image in Linux

If you ever want to mount an ISO image file without burning it to disk, this is how I would do it. First I would confirm that the ISO image file is really an ISO image file by executing the following:

file openSUSE-10.3-Alpha5-KDE-i386.iso

This should return an output like:

openSUSE-10.3-Alpha5-KDE-i386.iso: ISO 9660 CD-ROM filesystem data 'SU103Alp.001' (bootable)

Having confirmed that it is an ISO image, I then mount the ISO image file through the loop-back device to “/media/SU103Alp.001″ directory.



Create the Directory aka “Mount point”

mkdir -p /media/SU103Alp.001

And mount the ISO image using the mount command

mount -o loop -t iso9660 openSUSE-10.3-Alpha5-KDE-i386.iso /media/SU103Alp.001

The argument following the -t is used to indicate the file system type. You should now have the contents of the ISO image accessible through the “/media/SU103Alp.001″ directory, as shown in this example.

KDE supports this natively.. and I am sure Gnome does it too.

Great, I just discovered that KDE supports this natively. Just right-click on the ISO image and select “Actions >> ISO9660 View” and it should open up a new window with the contents for the ISO image. The only drawback is, the file has to be named with the extension .iso, else the context sensitive menu “ISO9660 View” does not appear.

Another way to open up the ISO is by typing the “iso:” prefix to the path of the image file in Konqueror browser. Eg. “iso:/home/jeffery/downloads/openSUSE-10.3-Alpha5-KDE-i386.iso”

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One Response to Mounting an ISO image in Linux

  1. Pingback: Mounting an ISO image - openSUSE Forums

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