Gizmo Drive (via Lee at Download Squad) is yet another tool to mount CD and DVD images in Windows. It can mount ISO, BIN, CUE, MDS, MDF, NRG and VHD images which are essentially the most popular image formats. Images can be mounted using the shell in Windows Explorer, the command line or the graphical user interface.

Gizmo Drive can mount as many CD, ISO or Virtual Hard Drive images as there are free drive letters available. Each image can be remounted during Windows Startup or write protected so that the data does not get changed.

It is also possible to create new ISO images with some interesting features besides being able to mount existing images. Gizmo Drive can create virtual hard drive images, ISO images from disc and virtual hard drives that reside in RAM and act as a RAM drive. The virtual hard drives can be compressed and encrypted for additional security.

The drive mounting software has a surprisingly low resource usage when minimized in the Windows System Tray with less than four Megabytes of computer memory total. Make sure you only check the GDrive option during setup unless you want to install other programs as well.

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.

ISODisk is another software that can create virtual CD drives. It is limited to the ISO format but can mount up to 20 images on virtual CD drives which might be interesting for users who need more than the usual 4-8 virtual drives that the other applications provide.

The interface if ISODisk is one of the cleanest in the field. All of the software’s functions can be configured in two tabs. The first tab displays the 20 possible virtual drives including their drive letters. The same window provides access to a file browser that can be used to locate an ISO image on the computer’s hard drive or local area network and mount it to one of the available drive letters.

The fact that the drive letters are displayed makes it very easy to select specific drive letters for the ISO images and provides a great overview of the currently mounted images.

The second tab contains an application to create an ISO image from a CD or DVD. A test with the original Fallout 3 DVD and the Fallout 3 Bonus CD lead to an error message. Could be a very nice and handy feature if it would be working. If you try it let me know if it works on your computer or if it throws an error message.

The biggest advantage if ISODisk is that it can mount up to 20 images in an easy to manage program interface. Support for additional image formats and a better explanation of the ISO creation are much needed features though.