How to Burn an ISO Image File to a DVD
You need to burn an ISO file to a disc (or a USB drive) to use it properly on that device. The process is different from copying a file to a disc. However, Windows 11, Windows 10, Windows 8, and Windows 7 include a built-in ISO burner tool that makes this easy. This process works for DVDs, CDs or BDs.
How to Burn an ISO File to a DVD With Free ISO Burner
The built-in Windows Disc Image Burner tool isn’t available in Windows Vista or Windows XP, so you’ll have to use a third-party program to burn the ISO file to a disc. As long as your optical drive supports it, this disc can be a blank DVD, CD, or BD. See this Overview of Optical Storage Types for more information on how much data certain kinds of discs can hold. If you’re using Windows 7, you can just double-click the ISO file. Double-clicking or double-tapping an ISO in newer Windows versions will mount the file as a virtual disc. The amount of time it takes to burn an ISO file depends both on the size of the ISO file and the speed of your disc burner, so it could take anywhere from several seconds, to several minutes, to complete. You can optionally check the box next to “Verify disc after burning” before you burn the ISO image. This is useful if the integrity of the data is important, like if you’re burning firmware to the disc. There’s a good explanation of what that means over at How-To-Geek. You can now close the window and use the ISO-file-turned-disc for whatever you needed it for. Here’s how to do that with an application called Free ISO Burner: Prefer Screenshots? Try our Step by Step Guide to Burning an ISO File for a complete walk-through!
More Help Burning ISO Images to Discs
You must have an optical burner to write ISO files to a disc. You will not be able to burn ISO files if you only have a standard CD, DVD, or BD drive. This is a standalone program, meaning it doesn’t install, it just runs. This is yet another reason why we prefer this ISO burner over others with huge installations. If you have more than one optical drive, you may have more than one option to choose here. Unless you’re troubleshooting a problem, you might, at most, want to configure a volume label for the new disc, but you don’t have to. Depending on how large the ISO file is, and how fast your disc burner is, the ISO burning process may only take a few seconds or as long as several minutes. Many ISO files are intended to be booted from after they are burned, like some memory testing programs, hard drive wipers, and antivirus tools. If you’re not sure how to do that, check out our How to Boot Your Computer From a CD, DVD, or BD Disc guide for more information. Some other freeware ISO burner programs that are available in addition to Free ISO Burner include CDBurnerXP, ImgBurn, InfraRecorder, BurnAware Free, and Active ISO Burner. You can also burn an ISO file on macOS using Disk Utility, Finder, or a terminal.
