I’ve been playing with a lot of different software lately, and have started bemoaning how many times I’ve burnt a .iso file to a CD for one-time use. I was going to buy a couple of CD-RWs to be less wasteful, but then I wondered if it was possible to mount them as virtual cds. I came across some interesting ideas:
- Microsoft Virtual CD driver. Unsupported, undocumented. Worked like a charm for me. I’d love to see someone hack a powertoy around this and add right click mount to .isos easy.
- Daemon Tools also gives WinXP this ability, and is free for personal use.
- Nero (ver 5+) includes a utility called Nero DriveImage that will do this as well.
- Linux can mount .iso files natively:
mount -t iso9660 -o loop /path/to/file.iso /mnt/virtualcd - So can Netware (6.5SP2 or higher):
NSS /MountImageVolume=volume_name:\path_to_iso_imageTo dismount the volume:
NSS /RemoveImageVolume=volume_name:\path_to_iso_image
It’s good stuff, and I hope you find it as useful as I did!