Virtual CDRom Drive

Thursday, January 22, 2004

Do you have a few CD ISO's and hate burning a CD every time to access the data?

I had that problem this morning so I went searching for a solution and I found (thanks to Brian Desmond's blog post) that Microsoft has an unsupported utility "Virtual CDRom Control Panel" That will allow you to create drives from CD ISO disk images. How cool is that? I'm using it on a Windows 2003 Server but it is also supposed to work on Windows XP.

12 Comments

ISOBuster is the one I use, I've found the Virtual CD control panel is a bit picky about the ISOs it lets me mount (quite a few MSDN ones for example don't work)

Scott Galloway - Thursday, January 22, 2004 8:17:00 PM

I had Daemon Tools blue screen a 2003 install because of the driver a few months ago. Don't know if they've fixed it since then.

If you own Nero, it includes a widget called ImageDrive which does the same thing as D-Tools, the PowerToy from MS, etc.

Brian Desmond - Friday, January 23, 2004 12:12:00 AM

i will try this program.......

yefri dasriyan - Saturday, April 17, 2004 12:46:00 PM

You can't share the CDROM drives created by Microsoft's utility. Is there another utility that allows creating Virtual drives and sharing them on the network?

Chuck - Saturday, April 24, 2004 8:05:00 PM

i want the virtual cd rom drive

yatin - Thursday, May 6, 2004 7:59:00 AM

None of the above works for the 64 bit version of XP.

Dayison - Monday, May 10, 2004 4:41:00 AM

Having same problems getting any form of vcd's working on xp 64bit

Nimrod - Tuesday, June 1, 2004 12:30:00 PM

Only solution I found as of yet is having 2 pc's on the network with one 32 bit where u can share the virtual drive and access it from the 64 bit machine.

Nimrod - Wednesday, June 2, 2004 7:30:00 AM

Seems to work just fine on Win2k, just mounted a Damn Small Linux ISO and read the html file in the root of the filesystem (title: "Why Are You Still Using Windows?")

Adrian - Thursday, August 10, 2006 8:31:53 PM

Hmmmm... the Microsoft tool works just fine on my setup(WinXP SP2 MCE) Used it to install software etc. i had backed up as ISO's on my external HDD. needless to say, it's a lot faster than using the CDROM disks themselves...dont know if it'll work for installing Ubuntu though...

Dxps26 - Sunday, June 10, 2007 5:57:29 AM

Hey, this has the x64 version of daemon tools for Windows 64-bit editions!!!

sony - Monday, August 27, 2007 1:03:04 PM

will it work on vista? if not, what will? :P

rosietheripper - Sunday, October 14, 2007 4:58:33 AM

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