downloaded txt.iso file: how to make a bootable cdimage out of it??

[steef van duin <steefvanduin@zonnet.nl>]

hello out there,

i should appreciate some illuminating help with the following problem:

for some reasons i temporarily fell back for work on woody, standard 
vanilla kernel.

yesterday i downloaded an official .iso file from woody (first cd) for a 
friend of mine.

i only can get this on my harddisk as a text_file, ending on .iso.

when I burn this file of about 599 MB with cdrecord and i mount this 
file the only thing i see is < debian xxx.iso >

my question: how can i tell my machine (the 'vanilla_machine') to make a 
bootable CDimage.iso file out of this downloaded file?

what did i do wrong?

thank you all,

steef