this program magiciso says that you can edit iso files with it
i thought an iso file was an exact copy of a cd or dvd exactly as the files were on the cd or dvd
so if that is true then how is it possible to add/delete files from an iso and have it still work?
is magic iso pullin a fast one?

what is painfully obvious to one person might be just painful to the other

There is no black magic behind that, only think that on a drawing board you can erase a sustaining wall of a building without causing the structure to collapse.

An iso image is an archive holding the exact structure of the media (usually CD/DVD) and if you alter each component of the structure accordingly your edit process the result is as you are acting on a drawing board.

ISO images are virtualizations of real media supports (that obviously can not be altered after burning process).

WinISO will let you modify an .ISO, and then recreate a new .iso. Just copy the .iso to your hard drive, then open WinISO. You can then modify files, add/delete/etc, and then create a new ISO. Must save as a different label. Then you can burn this new iso to a cd.

An ISO is an image of a CD. But you can also think of it as being somewhat like a ZIP file. So it's `possible' to do some altering and change the image.

i guess it would be like taking my cd of win98 and removing cab 40 and adding in a picture of my desktop

it wouldnt cause any problems i guess until i tried to install 98 w/out cab40

it still doesnt sound believable to me, the iso will think that there is a file named cab40 and it will be missing! how could it then be burned onto a cd?

what is painfully obvious to one person might be just painful to the other

It doesn't matter if the changes made are valid or not. The burning software only sees the ISO image as one file. Its like changing a single byte in a file. The name and size is the same. You won't know it is invalid until you try to use it.

An ISO image is just an image of a CD, including its file system structure. While the CD file structure is not like the FAT structure of a disk drive, it serves the same purpose. And these file system structures are well documented.

So if you have an "image" of your disk drive, a special program could add, remove or change files within this "image" just like it could on the disk drive. As long as the resulting "image" looks like an image of the changed disk drive it would work. So to modify an ISO image you only have to make the changes to the files and file system information in the ISO file image. Something any Operating System developer would be comfortable doing.

If your were to take a few seconds to think about it, BEFORE a CD is created, an ISO image of it has to be created on a system first anyway. So any program that is used to create CDs already has to have the ability to create and modify an ISO image anyway. So why would you think this program is pulling a fast one, when ROXIO and NERO are doing much the same thing when they build a CD image and allow you to add and remove files from the image before you write the CD.

ok thanks everyone
ill give the program a try, i was just curious as to how it was possible given the, like someone said and like i said,
iso knows exactly where the files were on the cd as it was made into an iso

what is painfully obvious to one person might be just painful to the other

hey,
today i backed up a movie i own using dvdshrink and then i opened up the iso in magiciso and edited out the stupid logo screens and stuff that come before the title menu
well, i burned it on dvd and guess what? I won't play in my ps2 or my panasonic dvd player
dvdshrink says that it has an invalid udf file system
so i burned the original unedited iso of the movie and it works perfect even in my ps2

so much for magiciso...

what is painfully obvious to one person might be just painful to the other