Mounting an ISO Image in Linux

You can easily access an ISO image of a CD or DVD (e.g. RHEL DVD) from the command line in Linux.

To access an ISO disc image, you have to create a mount point (empty folder that will be used as a root filesystem) and mount an ISO file to it.

In this article, i’ll show how to Mount and Unmount an ISO file from the Linux Command Line (CentOS, RHEL, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, Mint etc.).

To mount an ISO image in Linux, you must be a root or use sudo.

Create a Mount Point for ISO Image

A mount point – is a directory (typically an empty folder) from which the content of an ISO disc image will be accessible.

Create a mount point:

$ sudo mkdir -p /mnt/mount_point

Mount an ISO File in Linux

Mount an ISO file /home/user/disk.iso to the mount point /mnt/mount_point:

$ sudo mount -o loop /home/user/disk.iso /mnt/mount_point

After ISO disk is mounted, you will receive the following message: ‘mount: warning: /mnt/mount_point seems to be mounted read-only‘.

You can ignore it, because according to the ISO 9660 standard, ISO images are always mounted in read-only mode.

Verify that ISO File is Mounted

List mounted devices to verify that ISO image has successfully been mounted:

$ mount

Below you should see a line like the following:

/home/user/disk.iso on /mnt/mount_point type iso9660 (ro)

Now you can access the mount point and list the files stored on the ISO disk image:

$ cd /mnt/mount_point
$ ls -l

Unmount an ISO File in Linux

Use the following command to unmount an ISO disc image:

$ sudo umount /mnt/mount_point
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2 Replies to “Mounting an ISO Image in Linux”

  1. You may need a lowercase ‘p’ when creating the mount point subdirectory.

    $ sudo mkdir -p /mnt/mount_point
    1. Corrected. Thank you.

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