Marc LaFleur

Thoughts on finding a better way

Mounting ISO Images with Vista

After installing Vista this weekend I started searching for a good tool for mounting ISO images. This is actually one of the few head-scratching moment I've had with Vista so far - why didn't they bake this in?

I tried several that either didn't install, didn't work, or were in some way flaky. Finally I found a post from Arian Kulp on Virtual CloneDrive from Elby.

Virtual CloneDrive is a free utility to mount ISO images on Windows (including Vista). One thing I really liked was that it associates itself with the ISO images so you can simply right-click on a .ISO file and mount it directly.

Posted: Nov 21 2006, 10:15 AM by MarcLaFleur | with 16 comment(s)
Filed under: ,

Comments

Chyld Medford said:

Daemon Tools is better.  The current release of Virtual CloneDrive will not install Visual Studio Team Suite from the iso in Vista.  Daemon Tools does have adware inside, but can be deselected during install.

# November 21, 2006 10:58 AM

Guy Murphy said:

As mentioned by Chyld, Daemon Tools is amongst the most popular means of mounting ISO under Windows... I can confirm that it works under Vista.

# November 22, 2006 4:57 AM

Floyd Price said:

WinRAR will extract the contents of an ISO - just as if it was a zip archive.

# November 22, 2006 7:55 AM

Bellie jayaprakash said:

Check my blog for step by step installation.

Though I have given it for Vista RC2 it is true with RTM also.

# November 23, 2006 5:16 AM

Daren said:

Can confirm latest Daemon Tools also works on Vista x64, CloneDrive it would seem does not.

# November 29, 2006 4:57 AM

Me said:

WinRAR wont correctly deal with UDF ISOs....

# December 11, 2006 5:08 AM

Payton Byrd said:

Daemon Tools does not associate itself with an ISO and thus is lacking a major feature that I need in Virtual CloneDrive.  My 5 year old uses disk images for her movies and games and runs them by just clicking links to the ISO files on her desktop.  This works great with Virtual CloneDrive, but not with Daemon Tools.

# January 11, 2007 5:25 AM

The RASGUY said:

Daemon Tools has a new 'feature' in that it connects back 'home' stealthly so I would need to classify this as SpyWare.

# March 21, 2007 9:56 PM

name said:

this product DOES NOT work in vista as all they hype claims

# June 2, 2007 7:45 PM

Adam said:

Virtual clone drive crashes my system it work great when installed but when you restart nothing but blue screens, is this a common problem with vista?

# July 19, 2007 3:43 AM

Matt said:

Do not attempt to install VirtualCloneDrive on the final version of vista, as a few have already mentioned it WILL bluescreen and crash your system, had to use system disk to run a restore.

I also tried the lastest versions of MagicISO and daemon tools both also do not work on the final version of vista.

Still looking for a working tool to mount image files in vista...

# July 31, 2007 3:12 AM

ndru said:

I;ve installed Vista 32-bit Home Premiume. I've used VirtualCloneDrive on its for a couple of .ISO mounts. It hans't created any BSODs and its worked pretty well for me so far.

I've yet to try Daemon Tools, and won't do so until VirtualCloneDrive can't do something it should be able to do and I'm really deperate to mount the image.

I installed Alcohol on Vista and it just refused to mount anything. Its a pity because it is an excellent program on XP.

# September 17, 2007 12:17 AM

Anthony said:

I just installed the latest version of Daemon Tools on Vista Ultimate 64 bit. When I mount an image it practically freezes everything and I can't shut down. Mouse pointer moves but can't click anything.

# November 9, 2007 8:08 AM

Sean said:

Daemon Tools now requires ad programs to run alongside it. Not good. Daemon Tools does work excellent under Vista but the additional program that must run with causes issues with AV prgrams and is annoying.

# February 20, 2008 11:10 AM

Mark said:

VC by Elby does work in some cases but you're best to stay away from it esp if you're on Win Vista SP1 and using Maxtor Basics 1TB external drive per experience. It'll give you BSOD 77 Kernel_Stack_Inpage error at some point (randomly in my case) and possibly bad sectors along the way.  It took me quite some time to realize it too.  Nasty.

I guess with the buggy SP1, I think it safe to say that its best to avoid using image tools like this.  Extract it instead using tools like Isobuster.  Works for me.

@Sean

There's an ad-free version of Daemon Tools that I've run across.  I think its called Daemon Tools Lite if I'm not mistaken.

# December 19, 2008 11:09 AM

hfrmobile said:

"This is actually one of the few head-scratching moment I've had with Vista so far - why didn't they bake this in?"

You'll have a lot of other head-scratching moments using Vista ;-)))

# June 8, 2009 6:40 PM
Leave a Comment

(required) 

(required) 

(optional)

(required)