CyberNotes: Mount ISO Images in XP & Vista

Aug 05

CyberNotes: Mount ISO Images in XP & Vista

Time Saving Tuesday

Windows only
One trend that I’ve noticed as bandwidth and hard drive storage space continues to grow is that sending CD/DVD’s over the Internet is becoming a preferred way for distributing media. These files are typically in an ISO or BIN/CUE format, which most people will then burn to a CD/DVD before using them. The good news is that you can easily save the time and money involved in doing this by using a free virtual drive application.

How do you mount an ISO image? It’s actually really simple if you have the right tools. What they do is take an ISO image, BIN/CUE file, or any other supported format and displays it as a virtual drive on your computer. The drive will look just like any other CD drive in Windows Explorer. One of the huge benefits of doing this is that reading/copying files from the “CD” in this way is much faster than using a physical CD-ROM drive.

There are several free applications floating around the Internet that can do this, but you should be aware that some of them (Daemon Tools, etc..) might install spyware/malware on your machine. Luckily there are three great freeware solutions that you can trust, and that’s what we’re going to cover today.

–Virtual CloneDrive (Homepage)–

If you want a no-frills solution for mounting images Virtual CloneDrive is what you’ll likely want to use. It supports all of the common image formats including ISO, BIN, and CDD, and is capable of mounting the last used image file upon startup. You can have up to 8 virtual drives at any one given time, but the nicest feature would be the fact that you can mount an image simply by double-clicking on the file.

virtual clonedrive.png