the empty quarter

Most CD-ROM downloads come as ISO images which can be burned onto a CD. They can also be mounted as drives without actually burning them onto a disk by using the mount loopback command. The command below mounts the image foobar.iso in user’s home directory as /media/cdrom:

sudo mount -o loop ~/foobar.iso /media/cdrom


This assumes that a /media/cdrom directory exists on you system (it does on Ubuntu). However, it’s easy enough to use a different directory, e.g.

cd ~
mkdir foobar
sudo mount -o loop foobar.iso foobar


The command to unmount is also straightforward

sudo unmount /media/cdrom