Guide: How to Properly Burn CD/DVD Image (ISO) to CD/DVD

Submitted by whiztech on Sat, 10/03/2009 - 00:56

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. When we burn a CD/DVD image (the Ubuntu 9.04 CD image for example), we want the CD/DVD content to be like (1) instead of (2).

Burning ISO File

1. Insert a blank CD/DVD in your CD/DVD burner. Download, install and run CDBurnerXP. You should be greeted with CDBurnerXP menu. Choose ‘Burn ISO image’ (3).

2. Next, click the browse icon (4) and choose the ISO file that you want to burn. Select your CD/DVD burner (5) and burn speed (6). Choose ‘Disc at Once’ (7) as the burn method. Press ‘Burn disc’ (8) to start the burning process.

Burning in progress

Verifying Disk

1. If you need to verify the disk that you’ve burn from ISO file, you can use ImgBurn (I wonder why CDBurnerXP don’t have the option to verify the disk after burning process is finished). ImgBurn is also a free CD/DVD burning software but I choose CDBurnerXP over ImgBurn because of the simple CDBurnerXP interface. The ImgBurn ‘Verify disc’ function will check if the data written to the disk is readable.

2. To verify a disk against ISO file with ImgBurn, choose ‘Verify disc’ (9).

3. Click the browse icon (10) and select the ISO file that you use to burn the disk. Make sure you inserted the disk that you want to verify to your CD/DVD drive. Select the CD/DVD drive (11) that contains the disk that you’ve burn before. Press the start icon (12) to start the disk verification process.