[Tool] How To Create an ISO Image File From a CD, DVD, or BD

Make an ISO Image From any Disc

By Tim Fisher

Creating an ISO file from any disc is pretty easy with the right free tool and is a fantastic way to backup important CDs, DVDs, or BDs to your hard drive.
Creating and storing ISO backups of your important software installation discs, and even operating system setup discs, is a smart plan. Compliment that with an unlimited online backup service and you have a near bulletproof disc backup strategy.

ISO images are great because they're self contained, perfect representations of the data on a disc. Being single files, they're easier to store and organize than simple copies of the folders and files on a disc would be.

Windows doesn't have a built-in way of creating ISO image files so you'll need to download a program to do it for you. Luckily there are several free tools available that make creating ISO images a really easy task.

Difficulty: Easy

Time Required: Creating an ISO image file from a CD, DVD, or BD could take anywhere from a few minutes to over a hour, depending on the size of the disc and the speed of your computer

Here's How:

1. Download BurnAware Free, a completely free program that, among other tasks, can create an ISO image from all types of CD, DVD, and BD discs.
   
   Important: During installation, there's a Sponsored Offer screen that "recommends" that you install a browser toolbar. Feel free to unselect that option and continue.
   
   Note: There are also "Premium" and "Professional" versions of BurnAware that are not free. However, the "Free" version is fully capable of creating ISO images from your discs, which is the aim of this tutorial.
   
   BurnAware Free works in Windows 8, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, and even Windows 2000 and NT. Both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of those operating systems are supported.
    
2. Install BurnAware Free by executing the burnaware_free file you just downloaded.
   
   Note: BurnAware Free tries to get you to install a browser toolbar from AVG during installation. If you're not interested in doing that, you can skip the add-on by choosing Custom installation and making sure all three boxes are unchecked. You may also want to uncheck the Add BurnAware to AutoRun menu option near the end of the install.
    
3. Run BurnAware Free, either from the shortcut created on the Desktop, or automatically via the last step in the installation.
    
4. Once BurnAware Free is open, click on Copy to Image.
   
   The Copy to Image tool will appear in addition to the existing BurnAware Free window that's already open.
   
   Tip: You might have seen a Make ISO icon next to Copy to Image but you don't want to choose that for this particular task. The Make ISO tool is for creating an ISO image not from a disc, but from a collection of files you select, like from your hard drive or other source.
    
5. From Source, choose the optical disc drive that you plan on using. If you only have one drive, you'll only see one choice.
    
6. Click or touch Browse....
    
7. Navigate to the location that you want to create to ISO image file to, give the soon-to-be-made file a name in the File name text box, and then click or touch on Save.
   
   Note: Optical discs, especially DVDs and BDs, can hold several gigabytes of data and will create ISOs of equal size. Make sure that whatever drive you choose to save the ISO image to has enough room to support it. Your primary hard drive likely has plenty of free space so choosing a convenient location there, like your Desktop, as the location to create the ISO image is probably fine.
   
   Important: If your ultimate plan is to get the data from a disc onto a flash drive so you can boot from it, please know that simply creating an ISO file directly onto the USB device isn't going to work as you expect. In most cases, like when installing Windows 7 from a flash drive, you have to take some extra steps to make sure the flash drive is properly formatted and the files are correctly copied to the drive.
    
8. Insert the CD, DVD, or BD disc that you want to create the ISO image from into the optical drive you chose in Step 5.
   
   Note: Depending on how AutoRun is configured in Windows on your computer, the disc you just inserted may start (e.g. the movie may start playing, you may get a Windows installation screen, etc.). Regardless, close whatever comes up.
    
9. Click or touch Copy.
   
   Tip: Do you get a There is no disc in the source drive message? If so, just click or touch OK and then try again in a few seconds. Chances are, the spin-up of the disc in your optical drive hasn't completed so Windows just doesn't see it yet. If you can't get this message to go away, make sure you're using the right optical drive and that the disc is clean and undamaged.
    
10. Wait while the ISO image is created from your disc. You can watch the progress by keeping an eye on the Image progress bar or the x of x MB written indicator.
     
11. The ISO creation process is complete once you see the Copy process completed successfully box.
    
    The ISO file will be named and located where you decided in Step 7.
     
12. You can now press or click OK to that message, close the Copy to Image window, and also the BurnAware Free window. You can also now remove the disc you were using from your optical drive.

Tips:

1. You can only create ISO images from discs that your optical drive supports. For example, if you only have a CD drive, you won't be able to make ISO images from DVD or BD discs because your drive won't be able to read the data from them.
    
2. While you won't be able to follow my tutorial above exactly, there are several other free ISO creation tools available if you don't like BurnAware Free or it's not working for you. Some include ISODisk, ImgBurn, ISO Recorder, and Free DVD to ISO Maker.

More on ISO Files

• What is an ISO File?
• How To Burn an ISO Image to a CD, DVD, or BD

Related Articles

• How to Mount or Burn ISO Files in Windows 8
• How To Boot From a CD (or DVD or BD) Disc
• How To Install Windows 7 From USB
• Step by Step Guide to Burning an ISO File to a Disc
• How To Install Windows 8 or 8.1 From a USB Device

Source: http://pcsupport.about.com/od/software-tools/a/create-iso-image-file.htm

[TOOL] How to Edit PDF Files without Adobe Acrobat

Looking for software to edit your PDF documents? This guide describes free alternatives to Adobe Acrobat that will help you edit and save PDF files.

Rich Text Editor Control www.devexpress.com
WinForms Word Processing and Export DOC, PDF, HTML, OOo, RTF.
The PDF file format was originally created by Adobe in the early ’90s and there are now over 700+ million PDF documents on the Internet according to Google (search for filetype:pdf). There are several reasons why the PDF file format is still so popular for exchanging all sorts of documents including presentations, portfolios, CAD Drawings, invoices and even legal forms.

• PDF files are generally more compact (smaller in size) than the source document and they preserve the original formatting.
• Unlike Word and other popular document formats, the content of a PDF file cannot be modified easily. You can also prevent other users from printing or copying text from PDF documents.
• You can open a PDF file on any computer or mobile device with free software like Adobe Acrobat Reader. Google Chrome can read PDFs without requiring plugins and it can create PDFs.
  

Edit PDF Files using Free Alternatives to Adobe Acrobat

While PDF Files are “read only” by default, there are ways by which you can edit certain elements* of a PDF document for free without requiring the source files or any of the commercial PDF editing tools like Adobe Acrobat.

We will primarily focus on tools that let you alter the actual contents of a PDF file>. If you are looking to manipulate the PDF file structure itself like rearranging pages or merging multiple PDFs into one, please refer to this detailed Adobe PDF Guide.

An Online PDF Editor for Basic Tasks

Sometimes you need to make minor changes to a PDF file. For instance, you may want to hide your personal phone number from a PDF file before uploading it online or may want to annotate a page with notes and freehand drawings.



You can perform such edits in a PDF easily with PDFEscape.com, an online PDF editor that is free and also lets you edit password-protected PDF documents in the browser.

With PDF Escape, you can hide* parts of a PDF file using the whiteout tool or add annotations with the help of custom shapes, arrows, text boxes and sticky notes. You can add hyperlinks to other PDF pages / web documents.

[*] Hiding is different from redaction because here we aren’t changing the associated metadata of a PDF file but just hiding certain visible parts of a PDF file by pasting an opaque rectangle over that region so that the stuff beneath the rectangle stays invisible.

Change Metadata of PDF Files

If you would like to edit the meta-data associated* with a PDF document, check out Becy PDFMetaEdit. This is a free utility that can help you edit properties of a PDF document including the title, author name, creation data, keywords, etc.
The tool can also be used for encrypting PDF documents such that only users who know the password can read the contents of your PDF files. And since this PDF metadata cum bookmarks editor can be executed from the command line, you can use it to update information in multiple PDF files in a batch.


[*] If you planning to post your PDF files on the web, you should consider adding proper metadata to all the files as that will help improve the organic rankings of your PDF files in Google search results.

Edit the Text of a PDF File

If you want to edit the text in a PDF file but don’t have access to the source documents, your best bet is that you convert the PDF file into an editable Word document or an Excel spreadsheet depending on the contents of the PDF.

Then edit these converted PDFs in Microsoft Office (or Google Docs) and export the modified files back into PDF format using any PDF writer.

If your PDF document is mostly text, you may use the desktop version of Stanza to convert that PDF into a Word document. If the document includes images, charts, tables and other complex formatting, try the online PDF to Word converter from BCL Research or the one from NitroPDF – the former offers instant conversion while the latter service can take up to a day though its yields more accurate results.

Advanced PDF Editing (Images, text, etc.)

Now that you know the basic PDF editing tools, let’s look at another set of PDF editors that are also free but can help you do some more advanced editing like replacing images on a PDF file, adding signatures, removing blocks of text without breaking the flow of the document, etc.



First there’s PDF XChange, a free PDF viewer cum editor that you also may use for typing text directly on any PDF page. PDF XChange also supports image stamps so you may use the tool for signing PDF files or for inserting images anywhere on a PDF page.

Then you have Inkscape, a free vector drawing tool (like Adobe Illustrator) that can natively import and export PDF content.

Video: How to Edit PDF Files with Inkscape

With Inkscape, you can select any object on a PDF page (including text, graphics, tables, etc.) and move them to a different location or even remove them permanently from the PDF file. You can also annotate PDF files with Inkscape or draw freehand on a page using the built-in pencil tool.

The next tool in the category of advanced PDF editors is OpenOffice Draw with the PDFImport extension. OpenOffice Draw supports inline editing so you can easily fix typos in a PDF document or make formatting related changes like replacing color, increasing or decreasing the text size, replacing the default font-family, etc.

Like Inkscape, the OpenOffice toolbox also includes support for annotations, shapes, images, tables, charts, etc. but here you have more choices and the software also looks less complex.



The OpenOffice suite is a little bulky (they don’t provide a standalone installer for Draw) but if you have the bandwidth, OpenOffice is the best tool for manipulating PDF documents when you don’t have the budget for Adobe Acrobat.