Virtual CD drives offer the function to mount Iso and other image formats in the operating system. This can be advantageous in several aspects. A disk image can be used instantly without having to be burned first. Another benefit is that you do not have to carry CDs or DVDs with you on the road because they are available as mounted images on the computer’s hard drive.
WinCDEmu is an Open Source software program that can mount iso images but also cue, bin, raw, img and smb network shares. It is probably the easiest to use of all the different virtual CD applications. All that the user needs to be doing after installation is to double-click a supported disk image to mount it. The mounted disk image will be available seconds later as a virtual CD drive.
WinCDEmu will however not make itself the default application for those disk image file extensions which means that the double-click will not work if the file formats are already assigned to another application on the computer. It is possible to change the behavior of the file extension so that WinCDEmu becomes the default application.
Another possibility would be to right-click the disk image and select Open With > vmnt. This will mount the disk image as well and assign a free drive letter to it.
To unmount a disk image you simply need to right-click the virtual CD drive in Windows Explorer and select Eject from the context menu. WinCDEmu is a straightforward software program to mount iso images and other disk formats. Both Windows XP and Windows Vista are supported by the software program.
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Source? Link?
Is it better than Daemon Tools /Lite/?
Here is the link on SourceForge:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/wincdemu
http://wincdemu.sourceforge.net/
Link to the page… :P
Can you recommend one that works as a portable app?
Of course, KDE has this feature built in. KDE users have been able to mount and browse ISO images for at least the past five years that I’ve been using it. I didn’t even know that this feature was missing from Windows or any other environment, I just always took it for granted.
if i had a dollar every time Dotan Cohen said “KDE has this feature built in”…
Thinker it is different as it is not running in the background all the time. It is basic but should be enough if you only want to mount images. If you need additional features it might be not enough.
Well garbanzo, I’m still waiting to hear KDE works in Windows….
If not, who cares about KDE for normal desktop usage?
Here is an unofficial Microsoft ISO mounter,
small & portable.
Have fun!
http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/b/6/7b6abd84-7841-4978-96f5-bd58df02efa2/winxpvirtualcdcontrolpanel_21.exe
There is also Virtual CloneDrive (http://www.slysoft.com/en/virtual-clonedrive.html) mentioned at http://www.ghacks.net/2008/10/15/virtual-dvd-drive-clonedrive/.
@garbanzo:
I know what you mean. KDE 3 really was the perfect desktop environment, it came with almost anything you could ever need. KDE 4 is nice but doesn’t yet have all the features of KDE 3. KDE 4 should start supporting Windows in a few months, maybe we can coax Martin into doing an article on KDE in Windows. Or just download Kubuntu and use it on Linux.
Oh, I almost forgot to stress: you might want to wait a few months for KDE 4.2 to come out. That will be the first of the 4.x series that really is intended for end users, but it still won’t have everything that KDE 3 does.
thanks a lot for the explanation very newbie-friendly :-)
Thanks for the tip. Great program.