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4_2005-2006 Complete Applications #164339

Read ISO9660 images (normal CD-ROM images)

This article will show you, how to read the main informations of a ISO9660 image.

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<p><h1>Hi! Welcome to this little tutorial!</h1></p>
<p>It will show you how to read the main informations of an ISO9660 Image file.<br>
First of all, what is an ISO9660 image file?<br>
ISO9660 is the standard specification for file systems on a CD-ROM.<br>
An ISO9660 Image is a 1:1 copy of a CD-ROM to a file on your hard drive.<br>
Mostly the extension is *.iso. <br>
But there are also other formats like: *.bin, *.img, ...<br>
I only want to show you how to get informations from a normal image (*.iso)<br>
because this is a very easy image format.</p>
<p>If you open an image with word or something like this, you will see....nothing.<br>
That's because the first 16 sectors of a CD-ROM are always empty.<br>
One sector of a CD-ROM is 2048 bytes big.<br>
Note: Sometimes VCDs have bigger sectors.<br>
In this project the sector size is 2048.<br>
Then comes the header: CD001<br>
And now it gets interesting.<br>
The Volume Descriptors are coming!!!!<br>
The next 32 bytes are the title of the CD-ROM.<br>
After the title comes the System Descriptor.<br>
It's also 32 bytes long.<br>
It describes the system that you need that the CD-ROM works.<br>
For the next part of the ISO you need to know what an Endian is.<br>
It's a data format for saving binary data. There are a lot of them in an image.<br>
The most used in the whole wide world is the big endian, I think.<br>
An 32 bit endian is always 4 bytes big.<br>
In the ISO9660 format you need to convert a lot of endians back.<br>
I added a demo project that reads more information than this article.<br>
Just look at the screenshot!
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