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How to Mount a Disc Image within Linux

By DivineOmega | June 18, 2006

This tutorial describes how to mount disc images in Linux operating systems, such as Ubuntu, SUSE, Fedora Core, Gentoo and others. Various formats are available.

In most cases, you’ll be wanting to use ISO files, as they are non-propreitary formats and can therefore be mounted with most distributions of Linux. However, many modern distributions, contain the modules necessary for other format by default. Firstly, to mount you image, you will need a location within the filesystem to set as its mount point. For this, I used ‘/media/image/’ but some may prefer to use ‘/mnt/image’. If you wish to mount several disc images at once, a more descriptive mount point may be useful.

Anyway, once you have decided upon a name for your mount point you need to create it, open a terminal (in Ubuntu, this can be done via the Applications -> Accessories menu) and enter the following:

sudo mkdir /media/image/

These areas out of the file system are off limits to normal users, thus the use of ’sudo’ is required to escalate priveledges to root (the superuser). You will most probably be prompted to enter the root password at this point. Providing everything goes well, you should not see any error messages. If you do, correct these before continuing.

The next stage is to mount the image file. To do this, you must use the ‘mount’ command. Enter the command below to mount your image (depending upon its type).

ISO and MDF Image Files: sudo mount image.iso /media/image/ -o loop

NRG Image Files: sudo mount image.nrg /media/image/ -o loop,offset=307200

BIN Images: A program called ‘cdemu‘ is available for Linux users to mount these otherwise Windows only disc image files.

Alternatively, you can convert propetiery image files to the standard ISO format using a variety of simple tools available. These are listed below, along with the file types they can convert (although in most cases, this is obvious).

Alcohol 120%’s MDF to ISO: mdf2iso

Nero’s NRG to ISO: nrg2iso

Clone CD’s IMG to ISO: ccd2iso

Hopefully, this tutorial shows you everything you need to mount an image within linux. If you think I have missed out on anything crucial or have any other suggestion, please use the comment system.

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2 Responses to “How to Mount a Disc Image within Linux”

  1. Vanieter Says:
    July 23rd, 2006 at 1:11

    You can also use bchunk to convert .bin/.cue images to ISO

  2. airtonix Says:
    July 23rd, 2006 at 4:59

    what about daa files?, will i have to setup windows under vmware just to run this bloody power ISO stodge?

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