How to Mount an ISO Disk Image in Ubuntu?

ISO image file is actually a form of an archive. That's why if we have an archive manager installed in whatever your OS is, we can read the content of an ISO disk image file with ease.

Although unlike other standard archive formats such as .tar.gz, .rar, .zip, etc the data inside an ISO disk image is not compressed thus we can make an ISO image out of any CD/DVD or even Blu-Ray disk by using a disc authorizing software on-the-fly, without having to wait till the data get compressed.

It has many benefits such as, say that you have a disk that's filled with thousands of image files and you want to copy that disk to your HDD to be burned to another disk at later times. If you however follow the usual copy-paste method in this instance, it should take some considerable amount of time to copy the whole disk content because the OS has to carefully copy and paste hundreds or thousands of individual files into your HDD, one by one.

However, if you went with the "create an ISO image" using your burning software, then it'll only take extremely less amount of time which is somewhat closer to copying a single file that's equal to the size of the CD/DVD's data that you're trying to copy!.

Another benefit of an ISO disk image is its ability to mount itself as a "virtual disk drive". It's just like burning an ISO disk to a CD/DVD and then after the burning process is over, when you open the disk, you no longer see a single ISO file but the true content of ISO file itself.

Anyhow, if all you need is to mount the ISO file just so you could access its content with your file manager (without the use of any archive manager whatsoever) just like with accessing a partition, etc... in Ubuntu, then there's a small yet extremely useful tool called "Gmount-iso".

This is actually GTK written GUI aimed at the Gnome desktop but you can use it in the latest Unity desktop + many others without any problems whatsoever as well.

After mounted, you can browse/open the ISO image just like a normal CD/DVD drive, using the file manager...

Main features...

*. Extremely simple GUI.

*. Mount/Unmount ISO images.

*. Manually assign the mount location.

*. Mount more than one image.

Yep... that's about it. You can install Gmount-iso in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal, 10.10 and 10.04 (perhaps in the latter version too) by entering the below command in your terminal window.

sudo apt-get install gmountiso

I don't think anyone needs a guide on how to use it :). But if you're having troubles, just throw in some comments!.

Clonezilla, The Best HDD Cloning Utility That Comes With the GNU/GPL License

To be honest Norton Ghost is actually a pretty powerful hard-disk cloning tool. Not the only one, but I use it sometimes to restore my Windows OS partition (dual boot with GNU/Linux). It does almost everything. Split your image via several CDs/DVDs or compress it so the image would take less space, etc but that's not to say that it has its limitations.

The biggest drawback of Norton Ghost is that the time it takes to make or create backups of more than one computer (network or server backups usually). If that's so, and you're looking for an easy to use, OS Independent, open-source application that has the ability to restore 41 simultaneous backups within 10 minutes (5.6 GBytes), then Clonezilla is the one to call for!.

Won't win any "look-n-feel" contest... but it's quite powerful nonetheless!

It comes in two versions. 

1. Clonezilla live - Which is aimed at home computer users which allows you to boot into the utility itself via CD/DVD or using a USB drive.

2. Clonezilla SE - SE stands for server edition. This is for network system administrators who wants to to massive system image restoration, etc.

It supports a lot of GNU/Linux file systems + Microsoft Windows file systems, etc such as ...

*. ext2, ext3, ext4, reiserfs, reiser4, xfs, jfs of GNU/Linux, (2) FAT, NTFS of MS Windows, (3) HFS+ of Mac OS, (4) UFS of FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, and (5) VMFS of VMWare ESX.

So if you have a network that consists of multiple operating systems... no problem.. Clonezilla can handle that pretty easily.


Here are the system requirements (minimum). 

*. X86 (32-bit) or x86-64 (64-bit) processor/s.

*. 196MB of RAM.

*. Boot device supported - CD/DVD Drive, USB port, PXE, or hard drive.

You can download it from here.