Wednesday, July 23, 2008

How to Mount an ISO or an MDF image

The mount command can be used to mount any thing from a samba / nfs share to an ISO image.

in windows you need such tools as Daemon tools , Alcohol 120 etc to accomplish the same. In Linux it's a lot simpler. ISO images can be mounted without any additional tools. MDF images can also be mounted but they first need to be converted to an ISO file. To convert an MDF image to an ISO image use the mdf2iso tool which you can download from your distributions repository. eg yum install mdf2iso if you use a Red Hat derivative distro. Or apt-get install mdf2iso if you use a debian one. Once you convert the MDF file to an ISO you simply use the mount command to mount the image.

mount -t iso9660 -o loop

the loop option mounts the iso as a loopback device. This is neccassery when you are mounting a file of another file system in this case an iso file

Example:

mkdir /mnt/image

mount -t iso9660 -o loop /home/cgerada/films/the_dark_Knight.iso /mnt/image

The ‘-t’ option specifies the file type - this is optional, Linux is intelligent enough to see that the image you are mounting is of the iso9660 file type so you could just as well type.

mount -o loop /home/cgerada/films/the_dark_knight.iso /mnt/image

then cd into the /mnt/image directory to use the files ie cd /mnt/image.

To convert an MDF (alcohol 120) file to an ISO

type mdf2iso filename.mdf newfilename.iso

and then mount the ISO file.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sometimes converting mdf to iso isn't an option, because mdf can store damaged sectors while iso don't. Some games use that as a copy protection, so if you need to mount such a CD in Linux you can't. You actually lose data in the conversion to iso.
I had to learn this the hard way.

Please, linux users, stop to tell everybody that mdf images are 100% mountable in Linux, because then there is no motivation for anybody to make a native mdf mount. People just doesn't know this.

PS: Sorry for my bad English.

CG said...

aha, that explains the odd problem with the odd MDF image that refuses to convert, (I just thought the image was corrupt) although I have been successful with most mdf2iso conversions. Thanks for the heads up for the ones that refuse to convert

cheers