How would I go about mounting an iso file in Linux?

Like this...

mkdir /mnt/iso
mount -o loop knoppix.iso /mnt/iso

mount -o loop,ro -t iso9660 /path-to/image.iso <path-to-mount-point>

Thanks for that help but Im still confused! :P

My iso file is located at Mike/Desktop/ (iso here)

How would I mount it? Sorry just dont understand what has been said above. Im a bit of a windows user :P

You need to make a folder to put the iso contents into. That's why I made a folder called /mnt/iso .

mkdir /mnt/iso

Then, the mount command put the iso contents into that folder...

mount -o loop Mike/Desktop/(iso here) /mnt/iso

Normally when you do a mount, it's "mount (options) device directory". Options begin with a hyphen ("-"). Device is usually something like "/dev/sda". And the directory is just a directory such as /movies that you've created with a mkdir command, such as "mkdir /movies".

Let's take the case of where the .iso file is on your desktop. In your case, "Mike" I believe, it would probably be "/home/Mike/somename.iso". Let's assume that it's a movie that you want to play, and create a directory to play all movies. I'm kinda sloppy about this by not subdirring out of "/mnt". So, I just made a movies directory by "mkdir /movies".

So, where does that put us? Let's say that you ripped "Prisoner Of Azkaban".iso to your desktop. The embedded spaces are a nuisance, of course, but the mount command could be: "mount -o loop /home/Mike/"Prisoner Of Azkaban".iso /movies". You could also add the ",ro" (read only) as mentioned above. You could also add the "-t iso9660", as well. My system doesn't require either of those, so I don't usually bother. If you can see the file when you do a "ls"; i.e. if you're in the same directory as the file, you could shorten the command to:

mount -o loop "Prisoner Of Azkaban".iso /movies

Of course, "/movies" could be any directory on your system. Just be sure to understand that if you use a directory that has other files or directories under it, those will be unreachable until you unmount your iso file.

Good luck.

First you need some place to mount the iso file. If doesn't matter what you call this directory. Let's say it's called /mnt/iso. Then as root, "mkdir /mnt/iso" will create the directory.
Since the iso file is in /home/mike/desktop, cd there first to make the mount command shorter.
"cd /home/mike/Desktop/". You haven't said what the name if the iso file is, so for the sake of example, let's suppose that it is example.iso.
The type of filesystem that a CDROM uses is called "iso9660".

Look in the "man mount" manpages for options and filesystems I haven't mentioned. You probably want to su to root before mounting the image unless you have sudo setup.
# sudo mount -t iso9660 example.iso /mnt/iso/ -o ro,defaults,unhide,loop

The filesystem type is given after the "-t". The image is given before the mount location. The options are given after the "-o". The magic is due to the loop option, which allows you to mount an image of a filesystem as if it were the filesystem itself. Because the iso9660 filesystem is readonly, you can only read from it. You can not access the iso contents in the /mnt/iso directory.

Take a look at the man page for "mount"---ie do "man mount" in a terminal window.

To take apart the command, it is basically this:
mount <with these options> <using this file system> <this file> <to this mount point>

So, suppose you want to mount your file to /mnt/Mikes_iso The command previously given would look like this:

if the mount point does not already exist, you would have to create it with:
I have done this with full pathnames. Depending on where you are in the tree, you can use relative path names, but that is more confusing.

I used the case of a mount point in /mnt, but it can be anywhere. Just don't use a directory with data in it, or it will be hidden (until you unmount)

BTW: "mount" is really misleading--it goes back to the days of tape drives. "Connect" is far more descriptive of what is happening.

Boy, are you getting a lot of help!!! Lots of mounties out today....

wow thanks for all the help guys! Got it working