How To: Burn an ISO image to a CD

For the purpose of this discussion, an ISO file is a single file representation of an entire CD worth of data. You can think of a *.ISO file much like a *.ZIP file. You download one file, but that file has to be extracted in order to get to what you really want. In the case of a ZIP file, you’d launch WinZIP or the like and extract the files to a new directory. 

To get to the goods of an ISO file, you could extract – burn – the file to a CD. With that little bit of background, here is what you need to do if you want to burn an ISO file to a CD…

Your computer likely did not come with an application to handle *.ISO files, so the first thing you need to do is install one. CDBurnerXP is a simple tool to use and it is free. Once you have downloaded and installed CDBurnerXP, you may notice the icon change for your ISO file – this is because CDBurnerXP has now been associated with *.ISO extensions and your computer now knows what to do withe them!

 

(The examples shown below refer to the file ACRONIS9.ISO)

 

Open CDBurnerXP and select “Burn ISO Image”

 

Click the “…” button to tell CDBurnerXP what file you would like to burn:

 

Browse to the *.ISO file that you would like to burn and click OPEN:

 

Make sure you have the correct CD-ROM drive (DEVICE:) selected and that you have a blank CD in the drive and then click BURN DISK:

 

You will see the burn progress indicator…

When it completes, the screen will tell you it is done:

Click OK

Click CANCEL

Click EXIT

You should now be able to read data from the CD-ROM that you just created!

 

In the future, you can just double-click a *.ISO file to launch the CDBurnerXP “Burn ISO Image” wizard…