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Basic Information

Parent Format: Byte

MIME Name: application/vnd.efi.iso

Suffix: .iso

Openness: 🆓📖

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Introduction

ISO file is an archive of ISO-9660 (ECMA-119) file system. Because the ISO-9660 is usually used on CD, the ISO file is treated as a CD image file. But for CDs, a file system isn’t necessary. Some music CDs are simply streams of audio samples burned directly onto the CDs.

To separate the different songs, the CD defines the concept of a track. The track here is a logical partition, somewhat like a hard disk partition. Each track consists of several sectors. A sector is a unit of storage for optical discs. Generally speaking, a track is used to record a song, and it can also be used to store a data partition. The ISO-9660 file system here is used to put such a track. Therefore, ISO files cannot be used if you have multi-track CD or if the track file system is not ISO-9660 (or there is not a file system in track at all).

In addition, the so-called ISO format file also includes the image of the UDF file system. UDF is also an optical disk file system similar to ISO-9960, but the standard is newer and mainly used for DVD and BD. UDF images are sometimes use the suffix .udf, but .iso can also be used.