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Mounting An ISO Image Directly
There is a trick that we can use to mount an iso image while it is still on our hard disk and treat it as though it were already on optical media. By adding the “-o loop” option to mount (along with the required “-t iso9660” file system type), we can mount the image file as though it were a device and attach it to the file system tree:
mkdir /mnt/iso_image
mount -t iso9660 -o loop image.iso /mnt/iso_image
mkdir /mnt/iso_image
mount -t iso9660 -o loop image.iso /mnt/iso_image
In the example above, we created a mount point named /mnt/iso_image and then mounted the image file image.iso at that mount point. After the image is mounted, it can be treated just as though it were a real CD-ROM or DVD. Remember to unmount the image when it is no longer needed.