BIN to ISO Converter
Convert a BIN disc image to ISO in your browser. Upload the file, convert, download the ISO. No installation, no account, and the upload is deleted after processing.
ISO is the format Windows, macOS and Linux all mount by themselves, which is usually the whole reason for converting. Before you do, it is worth knowing what a BIN actually holds, what the conversion changes, and the one situation where converting will quietly lose part of the disc.
What a BIN file is, and why there is usually a CUE beside it
A BIN file is a raw copy of a disc, read sector by sector, exactly as the bytes sit on the physical media. It is a faithful dump, but it carries no table of contents. Nothing inside a BIN says where one track ends and the next begins, or what kind of data each track holds.
That information lives in the CUE sheet, the small .cue file that normally sits next to the BIN. It is plain text, and you can open it in any editor. It lists the tracks, their type, and where each one starts. A typical single-track data disc looks like this:
- FILE names the BIN the sheet describes.
- TRACK 01 MODE1/2352 says track one is data, stored at 2,352 bytes per sector.
- INDEX 01 00:00:00 says the track begins at the start of the file.
If you have the CUE, keep it. If you only have the BIN, conversion still works for an ordinary single-track data disc, because that is the common case and the layout can be inferred. For anything with multiple tracks, the CUE is what tells you whether converting to ISO is safe at all.
What actually changes when you convert BIN to ISO
This is where the two formats genuinely differ, and it explains the file size drop people notice afterwards.
On a data CD, each sector is 2,352 bytes. Only 2,048 of those are your data. The other 304 are overhead the drive needs to read the disc reliably: a 12-byte sync pattern, a 4-byte header giving the sector address, and 288 bytes of error detection and correction. A BIN keeps all of it, because a BIN copies the disc as it is.
An ISO stores only the 2,048 bytes of user data per sector. The sync bytes, headers and error correction are dropped, because a file on a hard drive does not need them; the filesystem underneath already handles integrity.
So the conversion reads each 2,352-byte sector, keeps the 2,048 bytes in the middle, and writes those out. Nothing you care about is lost, and the ISO comes out roughly 13% smaller than the BIN. A 700 MB BIN becomes about 610 MB.
How to convert BIN to ISO
Upload the BIN file
Drag it into the box or click to browse. If you have the matching CUE sheet, look at it first to check the track layout, for the reason explained in the next section.
Run the conversion
Press Convert. The sectors are read and rewritten at 2,048 bytes each. A full CD image takes a few seconds; a DVD-sized image takes longer, mostly spent on the upload.
Download the ISO
Save the file. It is a standard ISO 9660 image and needs no special software to open on any current operating system.
Mount it to check
Open the ISO before you rely on it. If the files inside look right, the conversion worked. This takes ten seconds and is worth doing before you burn a disc or build a virtual machine from it.
When you should not convert to ISO
An ISO can hold exactly one data track. That is a limit of the format, not of any particular converter, and it is the one thing worth checking before you start.
Plenty of discs have more than one track. PC games from the 1990s and most PlayStation 1 titles were pressed as mixed-mode discs: a data track holding the game, followed by CD audio tracks holding the soundtrack. Open the CUE sheet and you will see them, listed as TRACK 02 AUDIO and upward.
Converting that disc to ISO keeps the data track and drops every audio track. The game will install and run, and the music will be gone. Nothing warns you, because as far as the file is concerned the conversion succeeded.
If your CUE sheet lists any AUDIO track, keep the BIN and CUE together and mount the pair directly instead. Video CDs and Super Video CDs are worth the same check: they use Mode 2 sectors and are better left as BIN and CUE.
If the CUE lists a single MODE1 or MODE2 data track, or you have no CUE at all and the disc was an ordinary data or software disc, converting is straightforward and loses nothing.
Why ISO is easier to live with than BIN
ISO won because operating systems adopted it. On Windows 10 and Windows 11 you double-click an ISO and it appears as a drive letter. macOS mounts one on double-click too. On Linux, mount -o loop has handled ISO images for decades.
BIN and CUE get none of that. Windows will not mount a BIN, and neither will macOS. You need a third-party program such as Daemon Tools, PowerISO or Alcohol 120% just to look inside.
The gap is wider still with everything built around disc images. VirtualBox, VMware and Hyper-V take an ISO as a virtual optical drive and will not take a BIN. Rufus and balenaEtcher write an ISO to a USB stick. Most Linux distributions and Windows installers are distributed as ISO in the first place, so every tool in that chain expects one.
Online converter or desktop software?
Both approaches work, and which one suits you depends on the file rather than on preference.
An online BIN to ISO converter makes sense for a single image, on a machine where you would rather not install anything, or on a computer you do not administer. There is nothing to download and nothing left behind afterwards. The cost is upload time, which is the slow part for a large image.
Desktop software such as WinBin2Iso, PowerISO or AnyToISO is the better choice when you have a whole shelf of images to convert, when the files are large enough that uploading them is painful, or when the disc images are ones you would rather not send anywhere at all. Conversion is local and effectively instant, since it is limited only by your disk.
For one CD-sized image, converting online is quicker end to end than finding, installing and learning a program. For twenty of them, install the program.
What to do with the ISO afterwards
Mount it. Double-click on Windows or macOS. On Linux, sudo mount -o loop image.iso /mnt.
Burn it. Right-click and choose Burn disc image on Windows, or use Disk Utility on macOS. Burning an ISO writes the disc back exactly as it was.
Write it to USB. Rufus on Windows, balenaEtcher anywhere. This is how bootable installers are made.
Attach it to a virtual machine. Point VirtualBox or VMware at the ISO as a virtual CD drive and boot from it.
Common problems
The ISO is empty or will not mount. The BIN was probably not a Mode 1 data image. Check the CUE sheet for the track type. Audio-only and Mode 2 images do not become usable ISOs.
The audio is missing from a game. The disc was mixed-mode and the audio tracks were dropped. Go back to the original BIN and CUE and mount those together.
The ISO is smaller than the BIN. Expected, and correct. The missing 13% is sector overhead that an ISO does not store.
You have a BIN but no CUE. For a plain data disc this is fine. If you know the disc had audio tracks, a CUE sheet can be written by hand in any text editor, but you need to know where the tracks begin.
The file is not really a disc image. Not every .bin is one. Firmware updates, router images and game ROM dumps use the same extension and are unrelated to CD images. If a hex editor shows no CD001 marker near the start, it is not an ISO 9660 disc.
BIN and ISO side by side
BIN is a raw sector-for-sector dump of a disc. It preserves everything, including sector headers, error correction and multiple tracks, which makes it the right format for archiving a disc exactly. It needs a CUE sheet to be interpreted, and third-party software to mount.
ISO stores only the ISO 9660 filesystem, one data track, 2,048 bytes per sector. It cannot hold audio tracks and does not preserve sector-level detail, but every modern operating system and every virtualisation and USB-writing tool reads it directly.
