Recently, 3 of my friends asked me how to burn a DVD image (the ISO file) to a DVD. Basically, a CD/DVD image (ISO) file is a archive file just like 7z, RAR or ZIP. Unlike normal archive file, a CD/DVD image file sometime contains boot code and it is usually a complete sector-by-sector copy of a CD/DVD.

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In this post, you will find out how to properly burn a CD/DVD image. I will use the Ubuntu 9.04 CD image as the example. Latest disk burning software should support ISO burning to disk. The keywords to burn ISO file to disk usually sounds like ‘Write image file to disk’, ‘Burn ISO image’ or ‘Burn image’. You can use your favourite CD/DVD burning application as long as it supports burning from CD/DVD image. In this post, I will use CDBurnerXP, a free CD/DVD burning application for Windows.

ImgBurn is a lightweight CD/DVD/HD DVD/Blu-ray burning application. Currently ImgBurn is my favourite CD/DVD burning application.

The main reason behind the safe burning with ImgBurn is its buffer size. ImgBurn offers a maximum of 512MB buffer size for burning. Compared with Nero, you can only set the buffer size up to 80MB only and InfraRecorder allows you to set the buffer size up to maximum of 128MB. Buffers allows you to store the data that you want to burn in your RAM before the dara is being burned, which is faster than accessing the data from hard drive. Larger data allows you to store more data in RAM, thus reducing the buffer underrun. Usually, buffer underrun usually occor if the buffer is being filled at slower speed than the speed of data that being written to the disc. Heavy CPU or memory load from other concurrent tasks can easily exhaust the capacity of a small buffer, so larger buffer usually can prevent this from happened.

Setting Up ImgBurn to use 512MB Buffer

1. Run ImgBurn. Go to Tools > Settings.

2. Navigates to I/O tab (1).