Hello,
That's understood, it's just that your understanding was that CD burning software dumped or dragged the contents to a directory on the hard drive and not to a single image file just like an imaging software would do, so I was making this clear that it was not the case with CD burning software.
If the PC crashes before you get to burn the image file in Nero, the image file will still be saved on the hard drive in the default or specified temporary location, since it is only deleted once the burn has successfully completed. So, in the case of a crashed computer, you would just need to boot up again and burn the image file to disc.
On another note, personally I don't like using Nero, mainly because of the other annoying tools it installs by default, like InCD and BurnRights (not to mention the startup processes). I prefer lightweight and free like CDBurnerXP (which in a funny way unintentionally rhymes, lol!).