What's an iso, a bin and cue files? How do I burn them or load them?

[Creating Images]

Imagine you have a CD/DVD-Writer, but no standard CD/DVD-Rom drive... but you want to back up a CD/DVD by making a copy. Your burning program will, first copy all the contents of the CD/DVD to your hard drive, when that’s done, it will ask for an empty CD/DVD on which it will burn the content temporarily stored on your HD onto the empty CD/DVD. So copying a CD/DVD when you only have a writer takes place in two steps.

When the writer copies all this content to your HD, it stores the content in an image file. Iso and bin are among the most commonly used formats for image files, nrg(Nero), ccd(CloneCD), mds(Alcohol) are some others.

You can of course choose to copy a CD/DVD to an image, this can then be burned to a disk at a later date or uploaded to someone so that they can burn it to a disk, or 'mount' the image.

Alcohol is fairly straight forward, click on the 'Image Making Wizard', select the drive with the disk to be copied and so on.

With Nero you need to first select the 'Image Recorder', click 'Recorder' in the file menu and select the 'Image Recorder', 'OK'. Then it's much the same as copying a disk, except you choose the location and name of the image.

[Mounting Images]

Making sure your downloaded image works. Or if you don't have a CD/DVD writer, mounting the image is the only way you can use the image.

All too often "corrupt" or fake image files are downloaded, it would seem that the only way to find out if an image is a working one and legitimate is by burning it onto a CD/DVD and testing the CD/DVD. If it THEN appears to be a fake or not to work properly, you've wasted your time and you've wasted a CD/DVD±R. So is there any other way to check if an image works? Yes!

You can use several programs to do this, I'll just mention two. Alcohol and Daemon tools. Both of these programs(one can even burn images to disk) can create 'Virtual' CD/DVD drive, you can actually create more than one at a time thus mounting multiple images, this is useful for instance if the app/game in question has multiple install disks/images.

Both have copy protection emulation, for instance Daemon tools can emulate 'Safedisc' and 'Securom' as well as others.

[Down to Mounting an Image/s.]

With Alcohol you can simply right click on the virtual CD/DVD drive (in My Computer) and select 'Mount Image/Open', browse to the image(ISO, CUE(and BIN), MDS etc), click on it and the image then acts as though it were on a real CD/DVD, it will autorun etc. You can install from it, copy from it just like any normal CD/DVD. To mount with Daemon tools right click the tray Icon, select 'Virtual CD/DVD-ROM' the 'Device'(usually 0) and 'Mount Image'.

[Burning Images]

There are several programs to do this, Nero, Alcohol, CloneCD, and so on. Most people tend to have a preference toward one or the other, Nero is more versatile than Alcohol and CloneCD, in that it can burn different compilation types, Data, Music, DVD Video, S/VCD etc. Whereas Alcohol will only create and burn images(plus enable virtual CD/DVD drives), CloneCD will do much the same as Alcohol.

A) Nero
Open Nero, Click on 'File' in versions before 6.0, in 6.0 upward go to Recorder, and choose “burn image”. Now browse to the image file, click “open”, select your burn speed, whether to 'Finalize' or not(I would) and start burning.

B)Alcohol
Open Alcohol,
Click on 'Image Burning Wizard', browse to the image file, only select 'Delete Image after Burning' if you still have the original archives, otherwise de-select this option.
Click next, here you can choose the burner, speed etc.
When done click on 'Start'.

C) CloneCD
This is very simple, just open CloneCD, click the icon 'Write from image'.
Browse to your image file, Click 'Next', choose the burner click 'Next', choose burn speed, type of image Game, Protected Pc Game then click 'OK'.

Note: other programs may be used to burn bin and cue files. Although they are different from these, they aren't difficult to use.

But something more must be said about BIN file burning.

[What about bin and cue files?]
To burn a bin file, you will need an appropriate cue file. Burning an iso is easy, you just have to apply what I described above, but for bin files it is slightly different. You do exactly the same as for iso files, but when you click on “burn image,” you don’t browse to the bin itself, but instead to the cue file, and you open that one.

When the writer starts to burn, it will automatically search for the bin file and start burning it. In fact, the cue file tells the burning program where it can find the bin file that is attached to it. It is VERY IMPORTANT that you use the right cue file when you burn a bin. i.e both cue and bin files that are attached to each other must be located in the same folder, and every bin file has it’s own cue file.

Normally, when you download a bin file, you can download the appropriate cue file as well. If you do not have the cue file (or feel bold) you can make the cue file yourself, which is really easy to do:

A. Open notepad (Start-->Accessories-->Notepad)

B. Copy the following text into notepad:

FILE“name_of_image.BIN“BINARY
TRACK 01 MODE1/2352
INDEX 01 00:00:00

Where name_of_image.BIN is the name of the bin file you want to burn.
NOTE: Change MODE1 to MODE2 if image is PSX or VCD.

Sometimes you may get an error message when you click on the cue file, some thing like 'An error has occurred while loading the cue sheet blah blah (Line 1). This can sometimes be as a result of the path of the original BIN file being placed in the cue file, like the sample below.

C:/TEMP/MY_STASH/FILE“name_of_image.BIN“BINARY
TRACK 01 MODE1/2352
INDEX 01 00:00:00

Simply remove the path before 'FILE', so that it looks more like the first sample

C. The rest is easy: just save the notepad text with the name of the bin, but with the cue extension (Click on

file-->Save as...-->select “all files” in the “save as type” field, and save it with Bin name, put the extension “.cue” at the end of the name).

D. The file should be saved in the same folder as its appropriate bin file and should be something like .....whetevernameyoumaychoose.cue .
To burn the bin image, browse to your cue file after you click on “burn image.“