compatibility - Why does burning a CD ISO image to DVD work?

07
2014-04

Kev

Following on from this question:

Can I burn a CD ISO to DVD?

How/why does this work?

Is an ISO image a physical media neutral format?

Answers

NReilingh

An ISO is just a file describing data on a volume. Many of them tend to be the same size and type of data as you would find on CDs or DVDs, since that's where they're more useful--but the size of an ISO is completely arbitrary in reality.

You could "burn" the data from an ISO onto any volume large enough to hold it, be it flash drive, hard drive, DVD, or Blu-Ray; we just use the terminology of "burn" since that's what you have to do for optical media. ISOs can also be mounted as virtual volumes without burning them to anything--the Mac-only equivalent is the disk image, or DMG, and this is a very common method of distributing software.

ChrisF

To back up what NReilingh said and address your supplementary question:

Yes an ISO image is media neutral. As long as the physical media has enough space you can write an iso to almost anything.

With the right software you can even read an ISO direct from the hard drive. See the Wikipedia page on virtual drives for more information

Related Answers

Bruce McLeod

If the image is an ISO, most, if not all major commercial software can handle burning the image such as Nero or imgBurn on a PC or Toast or Disk Utitliy on a Mac.

As you are talking Fedora, you apparently can just Select DVD ISO image in file browser and and do a right mouse click to open "with CD/DVD Creator", the set your write speed. Full steps are here

As to the specifics of the question of fitting a CD image onto a larger DVD disk. Yes it works no problem, you just waste the remaining space.

joe

Short Answer : YES

Long Answer : Technically isn't an iso image file burnable onto just about any type of optical media, even blu-ray? it just is kind of a waste, burning a cd image on a dvd

It shouldn't be that much different. But did you select a DVD project, or a CD project? They are different in Nero express. If you have started a DVD project, I don't think it should ask for a CD. I am not a pro with Nero, though :-) and fellow these steps

if you CAN use NERO. its the best you know.

open NERO BURNING ROM. (NOT NERO EXPRESS). 

click on ISO.

change nothing.

click on "OPEN"

select the ISO file, the file you want to burn to disc.

Or You any one of these buners http://iso.snoekonline.com/iso.htm

Diago

As long as the medium is writeable and has enough space for the ISO it can be done. However practically it does not make much sense.

Windows 7 allows direct writing of ISO. I personally use ImgBurn.

Corporate Geek

Regarding Windows 7 & the possibility to burn and ISO file directly from it, here you have a tutorial showing you how to do this: Burning ISO Or IMG Disk Images In Windows 7

Justin Goldberg

Does udf versus the iso9660 filesystem make a difference? I think that's what the original poster is asking.

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compatibility - Why does burning a CD ISO image to DVD work?