PowerISO

About this release

Disc images stopped being about discs a long time ago, but the format stayed because it is still the cleanest way to hand somebody a complete, verifiable filesystem in one file. PowerISO is the tool for working with those files directly: opening them, editing what is inside, building new ones and writing them out, all without extracting anything to a temporary folder first.

Editing in place is the feature that distinguishes it from an archiver. An image opens in a file browser view, files can be added, removed, renamed and moved inside it, and the image is rewritten when it is saved. For anyone who needs to drop a driver folder or an answer file into an installation image, this is a two minute job rather than a full rebuild.

Mounting is handled by a virtual drive that behaves like real hardware. Up to twenty three drives can be created, an image mounted into one appears in the file explorer as an ordinary drive letter, and anything that expects to read from a disc reads from it without knowing the difference. The drives persist across restarts if you want them to.

The rest is format work. Conversion between the standard image formats, compression into the publisher's own compressed format for storage, splitting a large image into smaller pieces, checksum verification, bootable image creation with boot information preserved, writing an image to a USB stick as bootable media, and burning to physical discs where a drive is still attached. Audio disc images can be created from and extracted to normal audio files.

What it does

Edit images in place

Add, remove and rename files inside an image and save it without extracting anything first.

Virtual drives

Mount images as ordinary drive letters, with up to twenty three drives available at once.

Format conversion

Convert between the standard image formats and the publisher's compressed format.

Bootable media creation

Write a bootable image to a USB stick with boot information preserved.

Split and verify

Break large images into pieces and verify them with checksums before use.

Audio disc handling

Create audio images from normal audio files and extract tracks back out.

Changed in this version

• Faster image editing on files larger than eight gigabytes.
• Improved virtual drive behaviour on the current desktop system generation.
• Added support for further image formats on import.
• Bootable stick creation reworked with clearer partition options.
• Interface scaling corrected on high density displays.

System requirements

Install order

1. Unpack the archive and run the installer as administrator.
2. Choose how many virtual drives to create during setup.
3. Review the file association page and take only the image formats you want it to own.
4. Restart if prompted so the virtual drive component loads.

Worth knowing before you start

File details