An ISO file is a digital copy of a disk image that has been extracted from physical media. Creating ISOs is a great way to archive physical discs, which are likely to degrade over time.

You can mount ISO files or explore their contents as if you had the physical disc in your drive. This is increasingly important in a world where disc drives are less common than ever before. Here’s how to create them.

How to Create an ISO Using Windows

You can create an ISO file from a CD, DVD, or BluRay disc using Windows but you’ll need to use a third-party app as this functionality isn’t built into the operating system. There are plenty of free tools available for this task, but many have gone years (often over a decade) without an update due to the waning popularity of this process.

Fortunately, many of the ISO creation tools that worked with Windows 10 and earlier still function just fine in Windows 11 (we even tested this on Windows 11 for ARM). Today we’ll be using free app ImgBurn, a Swiss army knife for all things optical media-related on Windows. First, download ImgBurn from the official website.

Now run the installer and set up ImgBurn as you would any other Windows app, by following the installation wizard right through to the end. Finally, run the app to get started.

From the list of options that appears, choose “Create image file from disc” and a new window will appear.

Insert the disc that you want to replicate into your optical drive. Make sure that the drive you want to copy from is selected (the app will also show virtual drives if you happen to have any) and select where you want to save your finished ISO file.

While you’re picking a location, you can use the “Save as type” drop-down to pick the “ISO” format.

With the setup complete, all that’s left to do is click on the “Read” button at the bottom of the screen. You will now be able to watch the progress indicator increase as your file is created. Once it reaches 100%, ImgBurn will play a cheesy little jingle and you’ll find the ISO file in your chosen location.

How to Create an ISO Using a Mac

You can create an ISO file on your Mac using the tools Apple provides with macOS. This is a two-stage process: first you’ll need to create an image of your disc in CDR format, then you’ll need to convert it to ISO format. Alternatively, you can leave it as a CDR which is about as useful as an ISO to macOS anyway.

To get started, insert the disc that you want to copy into your Mac’s drive. Now launch Disk Utility, either by searching for it using Spotlight or by hunting it down in the Applications > Utilities folder.

You should see your disc listed in the sidebar on the left-hand side. If not, try removing it or reconnecting your optical drive (assuming it’s a USB SuperDrive). Once the drive appears, click the name of the volume that appears beneath the drive name.

In the example above, the volume name is “CARMAGEDDON” so I’ve selected that, rather than the drive name.

At the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on File > New Image and then use the “New Image From” option to select the volume name. In this example, it says “New Image from CARMAGEDDON.”

Now select the location in which you want to save your image. While you’re there, use the “Format” drop-down box to select “CD/DVD master” and leave encryption as “none.”

Click “Save” and Disk Utility will begin ripping your media to file. You may see a permission dialog box appear, use Touch ID or your password to approve the request and wait for the process to complete.

When Disk Utility is finally done, you’ll have a CDR image file in the location you chose. The last thing to do is convert it to an ISO, which you can do easily with a single Terminal command.

Open a new Terminal window and use the cd command to change directory to the location where you saved your CDR file. In my case, I put my CDR file in a folder called “ISO” in my Downloads, so I can change to it using:

cd /Downloads/ISO

Now use the hdiutil utility to complete the conversion process using the following command:

hdiutil makehybrid -iso -joliet -o filename.iso filename.cdr

Replace filename.iso with the name of the ISO file you want to create, and filename.cdr with the name of the CDR file you created a moment ago using Disk Utility.

Hit Return to run the command and Linux will begin creating your file. Once complete, you’ll have both the CDR and ISO file in that folder.

How to Create an ISO With Linux

You can create an ISO on Linux using the built-in command line tools. We’ll be using Ubuntu in this case, but the process applies broadly to Linux as a whole.

With your disc in the drive, the first thing you’ll need to do is make sure that your media isn’t mounted. There are a few ways to do this, but the easiest is to open Terminal and run the mount command.

Take a look through the various mounted volumes to see whether you can spot your disc drive and media volume. In my case, the disc was mounted at:

/dev/sr0

You can unmount it using the umount command. On Ubuntu, I need to add the sudo prefix and authenticate with a password in order to perform the action.

sudo umount /dev/sr0

Now that the drive is unmounted, we can create an ISO using the following command:

sudo dd if=/dev/sr0 of=/tmp/CARMAGEDDON.iso

Replace /dev/sr0 with the location of your disc media and /tmp/CARMAGEDDON.iso with the location and name of the ISO file you want to create.

Hit Return to run the command and your disc drive should whir into action. When you’re finished you’ll find an ISO waiting for you in the location you specified.

Getting Your Hands On an Optical Drive

The hardest part of this process might be getting your hands on an optical drive since no modern laptops or desktops ship with one. If you have a laptop you can find external USB disk drives, many of which will appear on used marketplaces. For this, I used an Apple SuperDrive that I bought second-hand on Facebook Marketplace.

Otherwise, take a look at the local library. Many of the computers there are older and still have optical drives you can use, assuming you can install a free app like ImgBurn.