A virtual drive is an emulation of a physical drive. That is a program that
uses a file to emulate or imitate a real drive either a hard drive or cd/dvd
drive.
So you ask your self what good would a virtual drive be? Well there are some
good uses for a virtual drive. Such as music. Suppose you have a collection of
cd's by a certain group (like the Who) and you like to listen to the music with
your computer. You could copy each cd and then use a virtual drive to play the
music. This would save the original cd from being used and damaged. I have all
the Who cd's and as time goes by they have become collectable items. They are in
their original cases and are not scratched yet and I listen to them frequently, by
virtual drive!
Another use for a virtual drive is for applications, you make a copy of the
installation cd and then put the original away. The cd doesn't get lost or
damaged and if you need to reinstall the software you just mount the copy on
with a virtual drive and do the install.
Another benefit with using a Virtual Drive is speed, even the fastest CD/DVD
drives are a fraction of the speed of a hard drive. Also your hard drive (unless
it is in a laptop) is always spinning, where as a cd or dvd drive shuts down
between reads, no lag time when the file is being read when using a Virtual
Drive, no pauses in the movie or music!
What about DVD's you ask, yes you can do DVD's also. This means you can put
your favorite movies on your hard drive and watch them on the flight from New
York to Rome and skip the in flight move. Plus you can have more than one movie
on your hard drive. The only limitation is the size of your storage.
So how does this work?
You will need two different software programs.
You will need a program that will make the 'image' of the disk.
You will need program that emulates the physical drive.
One such program that copies a cd or dvd is called Roxio. This is a CD/DVD
creator program. The program will make data cd's, music cd's, movie cd's, or
DVD's. It also will copy a disk and you can save it as an ISO (Industry Standard
Organization) image file. This is the file the emulation program either converts to a
certain format or mounts (loads) as the emulated drive. There are other programs
that will copy cd/dvd disks, I am most familiar with Roxio because it is bundled with both of the DVD drives I have bought.
To mount or load your copied image file of the cd or dvd you need a program that emulates
a cd or dvd drive, this is called either a Daemon or Virtual CD. One program
that I use is called Daemon Tools, it is a free download from the web (remember
that when you download from the web that there are people out there that will
add viruses and trojans to software so do your 'do diligence' and scan that
download before you open it!) Another fine program is called Virtual Drive by
the Farstone software publishing company. Both are very fine programs and will
serve you well.
Once you have the two required programs you can proceed with making your
copies to mount from your hard drive.
Using your cd/dvd burning program you make a copy of your disk, then save it
to your hard drive. Once you have the copy then it is a matter of either just
pointing the program to the ISO file and mounting it or as in the case of
Virtual Drive by Farstone converting it to the proper format and then mounting
the file with the program.
The newer versions of the Farstone Virtual Drive will create or copy cd or
DVD's and you can save the created file as a VCD format for mounting with
Virtual Drive.
Now when you travel you can carry your music, games, and movies with you
anywhere you go!
Remember that most software company's allow you to make one backup of
their software under license (Always read the EULA!)* but some
CD/DVD's have copy protection (such as games) and will not run in the virtual drive mode. Check
the EULA before making a copy.
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