While that is more of an aesthetic issue it is still something that could be problematic, for instance when trying to access media inserted into a drive (finding the right drive).

I never really bothered to look into the issue. Today’s article on Unlock For Us addressed the issue which made me address it here on Ghacks as well.

It is not possible to quickly distinguish physical and virtual optical drives in Windows Explorer, unless you have renamed drives to reflect that or by digging deeper into the configuration settings.

Uninstalling Virtual Drives

Here is how you remove virtual drives under Windows so that those drives do not longer appear under My Computer, Windows Explorer or other software that makes use of optical drives.

Open the Device Manager with Windows-p and the selection Device Manager from the sidebar menu. Locate DVD/CD-ROM drives in the listing and expand the selection.

It is sometimes possible to spot virtual drives right away, for instance if they have virtual in their name. At other times it is not that easy. If you know the brand and model of your built-in DVD, CD or Blu-Ray drive you can select the other drives easily to uninstall them. If you do not know those information, you could look at the drive type. A drive displaying SCSI for instance can be an indicator that it is a virtual drive, especially if your computer does not support that technology.

Right-click on the virtual drive and select either Disable or Uninstall from the menu. Disable will keep the device listed in the device manager but not on the system. Uninstallation on the other hand removes the driver from the system and thus the drive.

I suggest to disable drives if you are not sure if they are virtual or physical drives. Put a CD or DVD into your physical drive for identification purposes. Now disable the suspected virtual drive. Refresh Windows Explorer afterwards to see if you can still access the CD or DVD. If you can you have disabled the correct drive and can right-click it again to uninstall it.

Repeat the process for additional virtual drives if present until you have uninstalled all drives that you no longer use.

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.

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.