UltraISO Premium Edition

About this release

UltraISO does one unglamorous job extremely well: it opens a disc image and lets you work on its contents directly. Files can be added, removed, renamed and reorganised inside an image without extracting the whole thing and rebuilding it, which turns a half hour operation into a few seconds and is the reason the program has survived for two decades.

Format handling is wide. The standard image format plus the proprietary formats produced by the various burning applications all open, and any of them can be converted into any other. Compressed archives can be opened as if they were images, and the file browser in the program handles very large images without loading them into memory.

Bootable media is the most common modern use. Boot information can be extracted from an image, edited or replaced, and an image written to a USB stick as bootable media with the appropriate partition scheme for either firmware type. Machines that will not boot from a written stick are usually a scheme mismatch, and the writer exposes the choice rather than guessing.

The rest is the supporting cast: creating an image from a physical disc or from a folder on disk, mounting an image to a virtual drive so its contents appear as a real disc to other applications, verification against a checksum, and burning to physical media on machines that still have a drive. The whole program is a few megabytes and installs in seconds.

What it does

Edit images in place

Add, remove and rearrange files inside an image without extracting and rebuilding it.

Wide format support

The standard format plus the proprietary ones, with conversion in any direction.

Bootable USB writing

Write an image to a stick with the partition scheme the target firmware expects.

Boot information handling

Extract, edit or replace the boot record inside an image.

Virtual drive mounting

Mount an image so other applications see it as a physical disc.

Image creation

Build an image from a physical disc or from a folder of files.

Changed in this version

• Faster writing to USB media on current controllers.
• Improved handling of images larger than four gigabytes.
• Additional proprietary image formats recognised.
• Fixed a partition scheme selection issue on some sticks.
• Interface scaling corrected on high density displays.

System requirements

Install order

1. Unpack the archive.
2. Run the installer as administrator so the virtual drive component registers.
3. Restart if the installer asks, so the virtual drive appears.
4. Choose the correct partition scheme before writing a bootable stick.

Worth knowing before you start

File details