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If you have ever installed Windows, Linux or another operating system on your computer, you most likely downloaded an ISO file to do so. An ISO file is a digital copy of an entire optical disc, such as a CD, DVD, or Blu-ray, stored in a single file. It preserves the disc’s structure and content, making it useful for distribution, backup, or creating bootable media.
For the most part, you will burn the ISO file image to a CD\DVD or use a tool such as Ventoy or Rufus to make a bootable flash drive. You can even mount the ISO file as a drive in File Explorer to access the files on the ISO file. But many times, you will want to have a copy of the files from the ISO file on your computer so you can easily access them. In this article, we will be showing you how to extract the contents of an ISO image file to a folder on your computer.
The process to extract the contents of an ISO file to a folder is very simple if you use the right tool to do so. For our example, we will be using the free 7-Zip file archiver software. 7-Zip can be used to create and extract zip files and many other types of files such as ZIP, RAR and TAR files. It can be downloaded for free from their website.
For our example, we will be extracting the contents of a Windows 11 ISO file to a folder on the computer. As you can see in the image below, the ISO file is 5.41 GB in size.
Once you have 7-Zip installed, you will have a new right click context menu option for it. Then you can right click on your ISO file and choose one of the available options to extract the files from it.
There are three main options you have for extracting the contents of an ISO image file to a folder.
Extract files – This will give you the option to choose where to extract the files to. It will also let you create a new folder before the files are extracted from the ISO image.
Extract here – This will extract the files to the same directory where the ISO file resides.
Extract to (file name) – This will create a new folder with the same name as the ISO file and extract the files there.
Once you choose your option, 7-Zip will begin to extract the files from the ISO image, and you will be able to see the progress. You can also have it run in the background as well as pause and cancel the process.
Once the extraction is complete, you will have all the files that were part of the ISO image in the folder where they were extracted to, and you can take it from there.
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