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### exe to iso files

From Drakonian76

Answered By Mike Orr, Don Marti, Heather Stern, Jay R. Ashworth

sry to bother you but i stumbled upon your site while looking for this answer

how can i change an exe file to an iso file? It is not for me my friend put the job on to me to find this answer and after hours of searching i decided to ask you. If you have any helpful information on this i would greatly appreciate it.

again thank you for your time

> [Mike] I hope you're on a Linux system since you asked your question to a Linux forum. Our new submission address is linux-questions-only@ssc.com to emphasize this fact; "answerguy" at ssc.com is obsolete and is read only occasionally.

> I assume your friend wants to burn his program onto a CD-ROM, since "ISO" is often used as an abbreviation for ISO-9660, the filesystem type used on CD-ROMs. (ISO (www.iso.ch) actually stands for International Standards Organization -- or "International Organization for Standardization" as they call themselves -- an organization that publishes specifications not only for CD-ROMs but also for film speeds and lots of other stuff.)

> .exe is a file format, specifically the DOS/Windows executable format.

> [Don] Some .exe files are "self-extracting archives" which are basically a small MS-DOS PKZIP extractor and a PKZIP (".zip") file packaged together as one file. Under MS-DOS or compatible environments, you can run the .exe file to extract the contents of the zip file.

> Under Linux, the "unzip" utility can extract the contents of the .exe file's PKZIP archive while ignoring the MS-DOS program. See man unzip.

> If you don't have an unzip program on your Linux system, install your distribution's zip package or see: http://www.info-zip.org/pub/infozip

> If your .exe is in fact a self-extracting archive, it would be convenient to extract the contents before turning them into an .iso file for burning to CDROM.

> [Mike] (Linux uses an executable format called ELF, but does not use a filename extension to distinguish those files.) ISO is not a file format in that sense, it's a filesystem type. A filesystem is what's on your hard drive partition, what allows it to contain files and directories. ext2 is Linux's standard filesystem type, FAT-32 and NTFS are the current Windows filesystem types. ISO-9660, sometimes abbreviated to "ISO", is the filesystem type used on CD-ROMs.

> However, it is possible to put an entire ISO-9660 filesystem (or any filesystem) into a regular file. If you mount that file (using mount's "loop" option; see "man mount" and "man losetup"), you will see all the files and directories on it, just like if you'd mounted a CD-ROM. This ISO filesystem-in-a-file is sometimes called an "iso" file and may have the extension .iso . Certain Linux distributions use this convention to make ready-to-burn CD images available via FTP.

> In fact, this creating an ISO-9660 filesystem is a necessary step before a data CD can be burned. Sometimes the program stores it temporarily in a regular file, and sometimes it uses other tricks to avoid creating the temporary file (which is up to 700 MB).

> To write a CD under Linux, see the CD-Writing HOWTO at http://www.tldp.org . You can also use one of the GUI front ends such as KDE's KOnCD).

> [Heather] And if you're trying to write a Linux or otherwise generated ISO under Windows, you can see "Best of ISO Burning Under Windows" - Issue 68, 11th TAG article: http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue68/tag/11.html

> [jra] Interestingly enough, I discovered, apparently El Torito bootability is a feature of the image -- I burned those Linux BBC's from a bare ISO, no command switches to tell the Windows burner to make it bootable, and it Just Worked.

> I hadn't realized that it was (in Linux terms) mkisofs, not cdrecord, that did that work.

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Published in Issue 82 of Linux Gazette, September 2002

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