What exactly are ISO files?
Posted: Sat Jun 06, 2020 3:58 am
Hi everyone! (It's been like 2 years since my last post here oof, kinda miss this place)
I probably ought to know this already, but I think it's worth asking anyway so that I can clarify things, even if it's a bit stupid.
If you search "how do iso files work" on Google, you'll get results explaining at a very high level what ISO's are, how they're just images of a disk that (sometimes) have an OS installer on them, ... but that doesn't really help me. I wanna know how exactly data is stored in an ISO file. In what way is it different from a .img file? They're both just a mirror of some media that contains a bootable system either to use as a live system, either as an installer, right? So what's the difference, and what exactly do tools like Xorriso do that's different from just using dd to copy an OS installation to another media?
All this isn't very clear in my mind, so I'd greatly appriciate if someone could bring an element of explanation
Thanks for your time and have a nice day!
I probably ought to know this already, but I think it's worth asking anyway so that I can clarify things, even if it's a bit stupid.
If you search "how do iso files work" on Google, you'll get results explaining at a very high level what ISO's are, how they're just images of a disk that (sometimes) have an OS installer on them, ... but that doesn't really help me. I wanna know how exactly data is stored in an ISO file. In what way is it different from a .img file? They're both just a mirror of some media that contains a bootable system either to use as a live system, either as an installer, right? So what's the difference, and what exactly do tools like Xorriso do that's different from just using dd to copy an OS installation to another media?
All this isn't very clear in my mind, so I'd greatly appriciate if someone could bring an element of explanation

Thanks for your time and have a nice day!