ISO is a standard designed to bring the structure of compact discs to uniform standards. The ISO image in the general sense has now turned into a virtual version of a real medium with an operating system on board. The OS on it can be in a state ready for installation, or run directly from it - the so-called Live version.
One of the popular operating systems is Windows 7. Therefore, for installation, very often use the method of creating its image for subsequent installation. It can then be burned to a CD or flash drive. How to create an ISO-image of Windows 7, and will be discussed in this article.
Why do you need an ISO image of the operating system
The first images appeared in the era of the global development of compact discs. And many wanted to have a copy of a game or operating system in order to be able to use it in the future. To do this, we used special grabbers and programs that completely copy the structure and data of the CD. This data could be written to another CD-media or deployed to a USB flash drive, making it bootable in this way.
The image can also be used as the installation disk for the virtual machine, in which the operating system will be tested.
How to create an ISO image of Windows 7 from Windows itself
In order to create an image, you will need some source, for example, a folder with Windows files or a real CD. The original ISO image of Windows 7 can be downloaded from the official website of Microsoft. True, you will need an activation key that will help to use it in a legal way. But on the Web you can find a lot of different assemblies that can be downloaded for free.
So, there are two types of sources - a real CD and a folder with files on your computer’s hard drive. It is worth listing a few options with which you can create an image.
UltraISO - The Most Popular Imaging Software
The program is shareware, that is, in the Free version all the functionality will be unavailable.
The main window of the UltraISO program is divided into several small zones. The upper left window shows the structure of the current image. In the right window - its contents. The lower left reflects the content structure of the computer on which the program is running. And on the right is what is inside the selected folder on the left.
By default, an image is created with a date in the name. We need to fix this and rename it as it will be more convenient, because it is this record that will be displayed when it is downloaded.
To add files to a project, you need to select a folder or media in the lower left window, and in the right window, which files are of interest. You can simply drag them into the upper window.
When the desired set of files is typed, you need to go to the file and select "Save As." A dialog box opens that prompts you to specify the file name, its future location and format. In the list of available file types, “ISO file” is selected. By clicking the “Save” button, a progress window will appear, after which the Windows 7 ISO image file will be ready.
We pass to other options.
How to create an ISO image of Windows 7 on Linux
This operation in the Linux family OS is slightly different from this procedure in Windows. On Windows, you had to install the program and create an ISO image; on Linux, everything was ready out of the box. You just need to insert the existing media into the CD-ROM drive and enter a few lines in the terminal:
dd if = / dev / cdrom of = ~ / image_name.iso
This command will read data from the disk inserted into the reader and create a full copy of it on the hard disk with the specified name.
List of programs with the function of creating images
The following is a list of common software tools with which you can create and manage images:
Ashampoo Burning Studio Free. Free program with a good set of settings and functions. Nice and simple interface. It can both create images and burn them to disk
CDBurnerXP - a compact application, comes with built-in advertising. But if you search a little on the developer's site, you can find the Portable version. Able to record, erase, create copies of discs.
ImgBurn - distributed free of charge and has quite powerful functionality. Writes, erases and creates images.
PowerISO is a powerful combine that can handle almost any task related to images and disks. The only drawback is that you will have to pay for the full version, and the free version has limited capabilities.
IsoDisk is a small utility that can quickly create a disk image from media in a CD drive. It weighs a little, comes free of charge and performs only its task, without overloading the user with various settings and settings.
Conclusion
In this article, we briefly looked at a couple of ways to create an ISO image of Windows 7. This can be useful to those who do this for the first time or have forgotten some simple steps.
More complicated operations, such as creating a bootable flash drive, are described in a much larger volume and are beyond the scope of this article. In addition, you need to have at least basic computer skills. It is worth noting that the manual creation of a boot image makes it possible to run several systems for installation, or even from the disk in the Live version.