by Nik Rawlinson If you can’t see your attached drives, click This PC in the sidebar File Explorer can burn your ISO to an optical drive without any additional tools
HOW TO...
What you need: WinCDEmu Time required: Two hours
You’ve almost certainly come across an ISO file before. They’re typically used to bundle huge amounts of data, such as in Windows installers. ISO is short for International Standards Organisation, which is the Geneva-based body that ensures all countries adhere to common standards on matters like film speeds, currency codes and food safety. It gives every ‘standard’ a number, starting with ISO 1, which in 1951 established 20°C as the reference point for measuring temperatures. That doesn't mean every member state must adopt the exact same standards.
For example, ISO 8601 (www.snipca. com/47293), which regulates time and date formats, rules that YYYY-MM-DD is the “internationally agreed way to represent dates” – and with good reason. When you use this format, it’s easy to keep things organised: list the dates in descending order and the most recent associated event appears first. List them in ascending order, and the oldest jumps to the top of the list.
You can’t do that with the DD-MMYYYY format we use in Europe, nor MM-DD-YYYY, as used in the US. However, we can at least translate between the different formats – as long as we know our start and end points and which format has been used for the original dates.
The same can rarely be said for computer storage, so the ISO guidance governing files written to CDs and DVDs needs to be taken more literally. It doesn’t really matter which file format you use, as long as you have the software to read it or a tool to translate it into another format – plus, of course, the ability to locate the data in the first place.
Before the standards for optical-disc storage had been agreed, developers were free to write data in whichever order they chose on an optical disc. This could result in incompatibility between different systems and an inability to share discs or the files they contain.
However, with international standards for the way that data is written to disc (in this case, ISO 9660 and its successor ISO 13490) we can be sure that, whenever we put a disc in a drive, the system will at least be able to navigate the data. Whether you can open it depends on the software you have access to.
With the format being so predictable, it’s not surprising that new uses for it have since been found. One is to create virtual optical discs, which exist purely as bun
