Mounting ISO Files on Linux

Often these days, especially when working with operating system downloaded ISO images, it would be handy to be able to work directly with the contents of the ISO files rather than to burn them to CD and place them physically into a CDROM drive. Sometimes this is because the machine that you are working with is remote and sometimes because there is no physical CDROM drive. But often it is just inconvenient.

In Linux this operation is simple. We simply create a Linux MD device where we will mount the ISO file and then mount it using the loopback. In this case we will use the /mnt/iso location which is fairly standard:

mkdir -p /mnt/iso
mount -o loop -t iso9660 my_cd_image.iso /mnt/iso

An ISO is a Compact Disk image format so called because most computers today use the ISO9660 filesystem on CDROM media.  On Solaris system the older HSFS or High Sierra File System is often designated even when ISO9660 is used.  ISO9660 is an extension to High Sierra adding in important international support and standardization.

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