Virtual cd/dvd drive software (2011)

[worstje]

The part I enjoy most about Virtual Clone Drive is that it actually uses a simple, non-intrusive icon in the tray area. Daemon Tools and others I've used have very flashy icons, while this one is very colour-neutral and goes perfectly with all the standard white Windows 7 icons for volume, networking and the event center.

The devil is in the details.

[ewemoa]

Another option seems to have appeared:

  OSFMount

OSFMount allows you to mount local disk image files (bit-for-bit copies of a disk partition) in Windows with a drive letter. You can then analyze the disk image file with PassMark OSForensics™ by using the mounted volume's drive letter. By default, the image files are mounted as read only so that the original image files are not altered.

OSFMount also supports the creation of RAM disks, basically a disk mounted into RAM. This generally has a large speed benefit over using a hard disk. As such this is useful with applications requiring high speed disk access, such a database applications, games (such as game cache files) and browsers (cache files). A second benefit is security, as the disk contents are not stored on a physical hard disk (but rather in RAM) and on system shutdown the disk contents are not persistent.

OSFMount supports mounting images of CDs, which can be useful when a particular CD is used often and the speed of access is important.

[f0dder]

I've been using MagicDisc for a while, since it's simple and no-nonsense and works. But with the GPL violations and senseless new-image-format crap mentioned by Lashiec above, perhaps it's time to reconsider :/

I've used SlySoft's VirtualCloneDrive as well, and it was pretty good - it had problems when I initially moved to Win7, though, and iirc it was only controllable through an Explorer Shell extension... and it only installed the x64 version on my system, meaning I couldn't configure through my 32bit copy of explorer^2. Other than that, excellent app.

Stay away from Daemon-tools and the like. There's been adware in the DT installers, and there's a whole crapload of copy-protection defeating stuff running in kernel mode that you don't really want unless you need that kind of thing.

[jim262]

Virtual CloneDrive (Elaborate Bytes) runs on Windows 7, which many of these things do not, including Nero ImageDrive. My daughter found it. Good to file away if you move to Windows 7 and your virtual drive breaks.
 --
Jim

[cyberdiva]

Just to complicate matters a bit more, there's Gizmo's Best Free CD/DVD Emulation Software.  It was last updated this April.