Correct. An ISO file is a file that can be burned to a drive to create a disk image on the drive. A copy does
not work.
FAT32 is the standard format flash drives use out of the box. It's well understood, and readable/writable by just about everything. But it does
not support *nix links, hard or symbolic.
The FAT filesystem originated on MSDOS. The earliest version was a 12 bit file system. Later versions were 16 bit. The current version is 32 bit.
In a FAT filesystem, the smallest unit of disk readable/writeable in an operation is the cluster. Each cluster must have a unique address. The filesystem used on MSDOS used a 16 bit address, for a total of 65,536 unique addresses. How big a cluster was depended on the size of the drive being formatted, but the maximum size of a cluster was 32K. This meant the larget disk volume possible under DOS was 2GB. As drives got steadily larger, it became necessary to partition larger physical drives into more than one logical drive to keep each logical volume to the 2GB limit. This got old fast.
(And because a cluster was the smallest unit of space possible on a drive, and each cluster could only hold one file, large cluster sizes wasted space. On a 2GB dive volume, a one line batch batch file would occupy 32K of disk space. The unused portion was referred to as "slack" space.)
As Windows gained prominence, the need for larger drive volumes caused the development of FAT32, which used a 32 bit address, and permitted
much larger volumes.
On a FAT file system, you have a FAT table that is the entry point to the file system, directory entries in the FAT table that point to files, and files directory entries point to.
A *nix* file system works differently. The entry point is the superblock. But directory entries don't point to files, they point to inodes. An inode is a kernel maintained construct holding basic information about a file system object, like what its name is, what userid owns it, what group that id is a member of, the size of the object, the date/time it was created, the date/time it was last modified, the permissions that apply to it, and pointers to the beginning disk blocks it occupies. Under DOS and Windows, the file extension tells the OS what kind of file it is, and whether it's a program. Under *nix, it's considered a program because the execute bit is set in the object's permissions mask. Applications under *nix may use file extensions to identify files they work with, but *nix itself does not.
Under *nix, a directory entry points to an inode. More than one directory entry can point to the same inode, so it's possible to have the same file appear in more than one directory, or under more than one name in the same directory. These are called hard links. When you remove a file, you are actually removing a link to the inode. The actual file does not go away until you remove the last link if it had more than one.
The limitation with hard links is that they can't span file systems. Hard links can only be created on the same file system. To get around that, *nix has symbolic links. A symbolic link is similar in concept to a Windows shortcut, but more powerful. The OS follows the link and accesses the file on whatever file system it lives on. The possible issue with symbolic links is broken links. If you remove a symbolic link to a file, the underlying file is still there. If you remove the underlying file, the symbolic link is not automatically removed. You'll get a broken link pointing to something that no longer exists. *nix will throw an error if you try to access such a link.
NTFS
does support both hard links and symbolic links, but the functionality is not exposed by default. You need an optional MS utility package or a third-party tool to use them. Under Windows, I use William Schinagl's
Link Shell Extension for the purpose.
You aren't. You need to burn the ISO to a drive.
Brasero is the default tool installed on Ubuntu for the purpose.
______
Dennis