Virtual Clone Drive

Introduction

A while back, LifeHacker posted an article about ISO disk mounting software. This software allows one to load a CD/DVD disk image as a virtual mounted drive. This saves you not only the time it takes to burn a disk image to disk but also the resource as you no longer have to waste a physical CD/DVD disk to test your creation.

The following embellishes the original article posted by LifeHacker. NOTE: The software only works on 32-bit Windows.

Getting Started

Start by downloading and installing the Virtual Clone Drive software. Once installed you will see a new virtual drive listed within Windows Explorer, for example:

Configuration

Configuring the software is straightforward where you can disable or increase the number of virtual drives, automount the last image, and change language settings:

Usage

There are a couple ways in which to load and test a disk image using Virtual Clone Drive. The first is to double click on the disk image file and it will be automatically mounted in the first available Virtual Clone Drive in Windows Explorer. By the way, if you have any auto run settings (usually defined in the autorun.inf file) those will execute as they normally would. The second option, for loading a disk image, is to right click on the file and select “Mount Files with Virtual CloneDrive” as shown here:

Once you have mounted a disk image, you can easily unmount it by click on the drive and selecting “unmount” from the menu as shown here:

Tips and Tricks

By default, the software uses a lamb icon for all virtual drives. If you do not like this icon, you might think about creating your own ICO file by simple replacing the VirtualCloneDrive.ico found in the root directory of where you installed the Virtual Clone Drive software. I wrote a post about creating bookmark icons a while back which has steps on creating an icon file that would be applicable for this situation as well.

You can also mount disk images via the command line by using the VCDMount.exe. Simply pass the full path of your disk image file to the VCDMount.exe as a command line argument as shown here:

"D:\virtual-clone-drive\VCDMount.exe" "F:\misc\archive.iso"

Lastly, if you wanted to automate the entire process of burning disk images and mounting them, you might think about combining my post on Nero disk image automation with the command line tip above.

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