WinArchiver Virtual Drive is a free software for Windows that supports a wide variety of archive and image formats. Among the most popular formats are rar, zip, 7z, iso, bin, mdf, img, nrg, tar, gz and dozens of other archiving and disk image formats.

The software can install multiple virtual drives (up to 23!) in Windows which can then be used to mount the disk images or archives.

Each drive is listed with its own drive letter in Windows Explorer. Archives and disk images are mounted with a click on the application’s system tray icon and selecting the Mount Image to drive letter option.

This opens a file browser to select the archive or disk image format from the hard drive. Virtual drives are unmounted the very same way. WinArchiver Virtual Drive can autostart with Windows, and automount archives as well which is handy for mounting images or archives that are needed regularly.

The program is on most regards very similar to the popular alternative Daemon Tools Lite, but there are a few exceptions. Virtual Drive supports more formats than Daemon Tools, and it can create more than four virtual drives.

WinArchiver Virtual Drive is available for download at the developer website. It is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Windows operating system.

Virtual CloneDrive is a software that emulates up to eight virtual CD and DVD drives on the system. Each appears in Windows Explorer with its own drive letter and the user can perform the usual operations such as installing software from or exploring the CD or DVD that has been mounted.

The software works by adding two new entries to the right-click context menu in Windows Explorer that only appear when right-clicking a virtual CD drive. That makes mounting and unmounting new images overly complicated. I liked how Daemon Tools provided a system tray icon that could be used to mount and unmount images easily.

Several popular image formats are supported including iso, dvd and img but it does not support all the image formats that were supported by Daemon Tools Lite.

The software has a low computer memory consumption while it is running. It used up only 3 Megabytes of computer memory while emulating one virtual drive. Raising that number did not have a huge impact on the memory consumption.

The application had to be started again to add or remove virtual CD drives from the system. Mounting and working with those CD and DVD images on the other hand was uncomplicated. The application lacks an interface that is accessible while using it. It would also be nice to be able to mount images by right-clicking them or loading them from the program’s interface. Currently the only other option available is to assign the file extensions to Virtual CloneDrive so that a double-click would mount them.

This procedure is really helpful if you are using cd or dvd media often but are to lazy to get them and put them into your drives. You create a image of it and place it on your hard disk. When you need to access data from the cd or dvd you don´t need to go and get it, its already setup.
Daemon tools itself is not creating images, you need additional software like Nero for this.

The servers are really loaded at the moment, could be that you will have to wait until your download starts.

DAEMON Tools – Original Discs to Virtual Discs

DAEMON Tools is freeware that allows you to backup physical discs to a virtual format on your PC. There is a paid version that extends this capability, but with the basic version (DAEMON Tools Lite) you can emulate up to 4 CD/DVD virtual drives on your PC. This tool is useful have if you are interested in creating ISO and MDS images from original discs.

The virtual drives created with this software contain all of the data from the original source. These will appear on you operating system as though they were real. The point of virtualization is to take real data and utilize disc images to create drives that are “virtual” but they work like the real thing. This is practical for using virtual machines and the same methods can be used to convert discs of hard data into usable virtual data.

You start by selecting a virtual drive and then use any disc image that you wish to mount. DAEMON Tools will create the mounted disc image in My Computer and you can start working from there. You will quickly notice that the virtual disc works just like the original. Now you can start considering the possibilities. If you have experience with virtualization, this is an exciting piece of software for you to try. Once you see what it can do, it is likely that you will want the Pro version so that you can take the capabilities even further and integrate disc images for operating systems into viable virtual machines. You know what to do, if that is the case.

You can take CDs, DVDs and even HDs or Blu-Ray from solid discs and make them virtual, while also having the ability to us ISO images that you have created at earlier times. All of this fits into the Daemon Tools kit. You simply use this software to create .iso and .mds images from solid media. Formats that are supported include .b5t, .b62, .bwt, .ccd, .cdi, .cue, .nrg, .pdi and .isz.

The GUI can guide you through all of this “mess” and allow you to create easily accessed virtual drives. If, however, you want to use a command line, there is an excellent command line interface that can give you more control. For advanced users, this is like being a kid in a candy store, except you are a techno-kid dealing with file formats.

Can these virtual drives be converted to your own disc media? Yes, they can. That takes a little more tweaking and you need to remember that copying certain hard disc data and disc media does have legal implications. It is best to keep this as a way to organize disc data into virtual formats for ready access, strictly for personal use. For advanced users, there is much that can be done with this software. You can automate from the command line interface and perform basic actions from the DAEMON Tools gadget on the Windows Desktop, but where you take it from there is up to you.