Disk emulator for windows 7. Programs for creating a virtual disk

Depending on the emulator program, you can install five or six or even 10-20 virtual drives on your computer, and all this will not cost the user a dime, while the number of physical drives is usually limited to one or two.

Most users use CD / DVD emulation software for the following purposes:

Running CD / DVD images from hard disk without having to burn it to a physical optical disc.
- Increasing the speed of data access ( speed hard disk is much larger than optical).
- Backup multiple disk image files to new hard disc, which is much easier than burning several new CDs / DVDs.
- Preventing CD / DVD discs from scratching or wearing out with frequent use.
- Save a copy optical disc to your computer hard drive in case of damage, loss or theft.
- Freeing up workspace by getting rid of a large number of physical disks.
- Run disk images from a laptop or netbook that does not have built-in CD / DVD drives or with the drive turned off (to save battery power).
- Granting access to the disk for users on the network.
- Disk encryption for security.

Considering most of the above goals, all of the following CD / DVD emulators are reviewed and rated according to the following parameters:

The number of virtual drives available.
- Supports ISO and other image formats.
- Ability to create a disk image from CD / DVD.
- Interface and additional functions.

Overview

- this wonderful product allows you to mount an ISO file (or a disk image in another format) to the one created with this program virtual drive... After the image is mounted, it will appear in Windows Explorer as a "real" CD / DVD or hard drive.

Gizmo Drive supports up to 26 virtual drives. In addition to ISO, it works with other images, including VHD, IMG, BIN, CUE, NRG, CCD, MDS, MDF, and GDRIVE.

In addition to running disc images on virtual drives, Gizmo Drive will be useful when creating ISO images (both discs and individual folders), or for burning the contents of an ISO file or folder to an optical disc. To perform various tasks, the program provides a special manager and image wizard.

The user interface of Gizmo Drive is informative and helpful. Additional features of the program include creating GDRIVE images to simulate a hard disk with compression and encryption, creating virtual hard disk support system memory to improve performance in gaining access to time-dependent data, etc.

Another emulator designed for creating and managing virtual CD / DVD drives. It allows you to run many types of disc images without burning them to CD or DVD. Also, this program will help you create disc images and save them in various formats (including ISO, BIN / CUE, NRG and UIF).

MagicDisc Virtual DVD / CD-ROM has a simple interface and supports up to 15 virtual drives simultaneously. Other features supported by this program include compression of various formats (ISO, NRG, CUE, MDS, CCD) to UIF, and UIF recovery to ISO. The function of writing images to CD / DVD discs is not supported by this program.

Another easy-to-use emulator is called. With its help, a disk image can be mounted on a virtual drive in just two mouse clicks. As with the aforementioned programs, this is achieved using the auxiliary commands that appear in the context menu of Windows Explorer and are used to mount and unmount images.

V latest versions Virtual CloneDrive can be installed (just like MagicDisc Virtual DVD / CD-ROM) up to 15 virtual drives. To the original useful opportunities utilities can also include automatic mounting of the last image and special icons that denote virtual drives (to distinguish them from physical ones).

The list of supported formats for Virtual CloneDrive includes ISO, CCD, IMG, UDF, BIN, etc., but NRG, MDF / MDS and some others are not supported. This, as well as the lack of the ability to create and burn disc images is a disadvantage of this program.

Other programs

In addition to the aforementioned products, there are a number of other free software that perform similar functions. Below you can view a list of some of them:

Alcohol 52% Free Edition is a stripped-down version of the commercial product Alcohol 120%. The free version is limited to 6 virtual drives, and installs the search bar in your browser (can be disabled). Additional features- CD / DVD manager and wizard for creating images in ISO, MDS, CCD and CUE formats.

DAEMON Tools Lite only supports 4 virtual drives. Supported formats include ISO, ISZ, CCD, CDI, CUE, MDS, NRG, BWT, PDI, etc. DAEMON Tools Lite also allows you to create images in ISO and MDS formats. This program, like the previous one, installs an additional search bar in your browser and changes the main search provider.

Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel - free utility from Microsoft, running on the Windows XP operating system, and allowing you to add or remove virtual drives from A to Z. Supported formats: ISO, UDF, CDFS, ROCK or JO. Cons - not very user-friendly interface and lack of the ability to create images.

WinCDEmu is a program with open source, allowing you to mount CD / DVD images with a simple click on desired file... To dismantle the image, you just need to double-click on it again, or remove the corresponding drive using the context menu. The utility supports ISO, CUE, NRG, MDS / MDF, CCD, IMG formats and works in operating systems from WinXP to Win7. Cons - the lack of an uninstaller, and the impossibility of creating images.

In this section of the catalog we present to you best programs to work with disks. You can download them to your PC right now and completely free of charge. The utilities have been tested for viral code, they are safe to use and multifunctional.

Daemon tools lite

Despite its rather light weight, the utility has a lot of power and a wide range of tools. By using Daemon tools Lite You will be able to play literally all possible disc images (B5T, BWT, ISO, etc.) made by one of the programs for copying. One of the features of the software is that it allows you not to use the original disc every time.

In addition, Daemon Tools Lite will allow you to run pirated copies. The program has several special modes that are necessary for normal work copies of discs with an advanced level of protection (a useful option for discs with modern toys).

Among the advantages of the utility, it is necessary to highlight a simple and intuitive interface, multilingualism, functionality. With it you can use any CD image and DVD discs as if they were recorded on a disc that is on the CD-ROM itself.

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Alcohol 120%

Another free and useful utility... Alcohol 120% will allow you to copy to protected and unprotected discs, burn to CD and DVD. You will be able to create exact images with a disk, and then load them into virtual drives without using physical media.

The list of advantages of the program includes support for literally all formats of CD and DVD disks, and in addition, modern formats such as ATAPI SCSI. You can create up to 6 virtual drives, and all of them will support disk imaging at 200x speed. The list of possible disc formats is very extensive (CUE, CCD, MDS and many others). There are several custom image file extensions. You can create up to 31 disc images for free.

A lot of users personal computers on the Windows platform, questions are often asked - what are virtual disks and how to create virtual disk... To increase the awareness of our readers in these issues, in this article we will try to fully disclose the topic with specific examples.

Also in our article we will consider what is virtual hard drives and where they are used. After reading the material, our readers will be able to easily create virtual hard disks and image disk in ISO format, as well as easily mount them on virtual device and burn to DVD.

Virtual optical drive and its applications

The main purpose of a virtual disk drive is mounting images optical discs... To understand in detail why it is needed, we will consider an example where disk image in ISO format will be mounted on a virtual DVD-ROM. For this example, we will be using the Windows 10 operating system.

A nice moment for owners of computers with the Windows 10 operating system will be the fact that a virtual DVD-ROM is already installed in it. Therefore, Windows 10 owners will not have to use third party programs to mount images.

To mount an optical disc image to a virtual DVD-ROM, we need the image itself. For example, we will use image with operating Linux system Ubuntu... Download the image of this operating system can be found on its official website http://www.ubuntu.com. In our example, we will use the image 64 bit Ubuntu version 15.10 which is 1.1 GB in size.

Having loaded the image, you can start mounting it directly. To do this, click on the image file right click mouse to open the context menu.

The mounted "virtual disk" can be opened and all of its contents copied.

As you can see from the example, we have mounted the Ubuntu OS image on a virtual DVD drive. In fact, we were able to do practically what we do with a regular and optical disc, when we insert it into the DVD drive and open it, only in our version all the components are virtual.

Laser disc imaging

In the previous example, we looked at how to open an image disk in a virtual DVD drive. Now let's deal with the situation when you need to create an image of an optical disk. To create an image, we need the DAEMON Tools Lite program, which must be downloaded and installed. It is also worth noting that in addition to creating various image formats, DAEMON Tools Lite can also mount a huge variety of formats to its own virtual DVD drive. After installing the program DAEMON Tools Lite in Explorer you can see a new drive named ""

This "" is precisely the drive of the program in question. DAEMON Tools Lite... In this example, we will create an image of the original Windows 10 installation DVD. To convert the 10 installation DVD into an image, insert it into the DVD drive. Now let's run the utility and go to the section " New image».

In the utility window we find the button " Create image from disk"And click it. These actions will take us to the image creation window.

In this window, you can select the DVD drive from which the ISO image will be created, as well as select the location to save it.

We will also select the image ISO format and confirm the creation by clicking the Start button, which will start creating a DVD image with Windows 10.

After creation, we will receive an ISO image file with the name "J_CCSA_X86FRE_RU-RU_DV5.iso", which can be mounted or burned to a regular disc and installed with a new Windows using it.

The example shows how easy it is to burn an image for a virtual DVD-ROM using DAEMON Tools Lite... In the same way, you can record images for everyone. licensed disks Windows, be it XP or Vista. In addition, you can record images of games or software that do not start without a disc. Besides the program DAEMON Tools Lite I would like to advise other popular utilities that can create and allow you to open an image of optical disks:

Alcohol 120%;
Gizmo Drive;
WinCDEmu.

It is especially important to use these utilities on an OS that does not have built-in virtual DVD drives, for example, in OS Windows XP. Besides XP support, each of these programs including DAEMON Tools Lite, will be able to write ISO images to DVD disk. In addition to supporting the ISO format, these utilities can mount other formats, including their own, they can be burned to regular discs.

Virtual hard disk

A virtual hard disk is quite often used by IT specialists, as it allows you to solve many problems with backup, virtual machines and testing various operating systems. Virtual hard disk is a container file that mimics file structure hard disk.

Since such a disk is a file, so it is usually stored on a physical HDD or SSD. Starting with Windows 7, users have the ability to create and mount a hard disk directly in the operating system.

Let's consider an example of creating a virtual hard disk using Windows 10. First, let's go to the utility “ Execute"Using the Win + R key combination and type the following command in it: diskmgmt.msc

This command will transfer us to the Disk Control Panel.

To create a new virtual HDD, you need to go to the menu " Action / Create virtual hard disk"Which will open a window to create such a disk.

Starting with Windows 10, it became possible to create a disk from the " VHDX". Unlike the "VHD" format, the " VHDX»Can create containers up to 64 terabytes... Let's make our 100 GB virtual hard disk in a new format " VHDX", And also set the switch to dynamic creation mode, in which our disk will grow as it fills.

After setting the parameters of our hard disk, press the OK button, which will allow it to be written to the specified folder on the screw. Once created in the output, we get a virtual hard disk named "virtual disk.vhdx". From the image below, you can see that our disk was automatically mounted, but it is still not visible on the system.

For the system to see our VHDX disk, it must be initialized. This can be done by right-clicking on the VHDX disk and selecting “ Initialize disk».

In the window that appears, do not change anything and click the OK button.

Now the simplest thing is left, choose for our disk file system and a letter. To do this, go to it and select the item " Create simple volume».

After that, a wizard will start, in which you need to assign a drive letter and select a file system. After completing the wizard, the virtual hard disk will appear in Explorer.

The example shows that creating a virtual HDD using OS tools is very simple, so we hope that you will no longer have a question - how to create a virtual hard disk. I would also like to note that with the created VHDX disk, you can do such operations as:

Encrypt it with BitLocker;
Install an additional OS on it;
Move and open it on another computer;
Connect it to a virtual machine.

For computers based on the operating room Windows systems XP, which is still quite popular, lacks support for VHD disks. But do not be upset, because in the utility we reviewed earlier DAEMON Tools Lite there is support for VHD disks and it fully compatible with Windows XP.

Using a VHD disk in a virtual machine

Let's create with the program VirtualBox virtual a machine based on the Windows XP operating system. At the stage of creating a virtual machine for XP, you will be prompted to create or attach a virtual hard disk that will be used to install Windows XP on it.

At this point, we can attach the VHD disk, which we will create with using Windows 10. Therefore, we will try to attach our 30 GB VHD container, which we made in the top ten. After creating a virtual machine, you can view the attached VHD disk in its settings.

If there is not enough space in the virtual machine on XP, then you can always attach new VHD virtual hard disk... Besides, you can connect containers with different file data to the virtual machine for XP... In the same way, you can use a virtual machine from others software products... For example, VHD containers can be installed on VMware Workstation products.

Outcome

From the material considered, it can be seen that the use of virtual drives and hard drives it helps to solve many problems much better, especially since even a novice PC user will understand their creation. We hope that our material will help our readers to better understand the question - how to create a virtual disk and how to use it for work.

How to make a disk image using standard Windows tools

First, let's look at the standard functionality of mounting CD / DVD images in Windows 8.1.

Time of creation Windows versions 8, from which the standard functionality for working with disk images migrated to all successor versions - Windows 8.1 and 10 - accounted for the massive phenomenon of refusal of manufacturers of computer devices to complete their drives. CD / DVDs were out of date, and the lack of a drive made the final cost of individual notebook models and PC assemblies cheaper. Microsoft, in fact, had nothing else to do but to implement the standard ability to connect disk images, at least only in the popular ISO format, so as not to take away the bread from the developers at all third-party software... So, if in the version of Windows 7, mounting disk images is possible only through third-party software, then users can view the contents of the disk itself in ISO format using the system.

So how do you mount an ISO disk image in Windows 8.x and Windows 10? In Explorer, select the ISO file, open the context menu and select the "Connect" command.

That's it - the image is mounted and visible in the virtual drive. You can start viewing its contents in System Explorer.

Disk imaging software

Mounting images in Deamon Tools

Deamon Tools is the market leader software to create a disk image. The first version of Deamon Tools appeared in 2000, and, despite the fact that its counterparts were released on the software market earlier, it immediately quickly gained popularity due to its friendly user interface and the free Lite edition, which was more than enough for non-professional home use. Daemon Tools works with almost all disk image formats. The program's operation is invisible even for low-power devices, since it uses a minimum of system resources. The free Lite version contains limitations - in particular, this is the ability to simultaneously mount only 4 virtual drives. Whereas in paid Pro version Advanced, 32 drives can be mounted on the computer.

Relatively recently, Daemon Tools has radically changed, and the classic interface has been replaced by dullness and wretchedness, but with a very clear description of functions and a clear internal organization of sections. The functionality of the program has been replenished, but not everything is available in the Lite version. Naked demonstration of individual functions without the possibility of using them is a marketing ploy to entice users to purchase the paid version.

Daemon Tools Lite 10 is available for free download on the developer's website.

An important point during installation - select an option free license.

Among the innovations of the Daemon Tools version is the option to scan your computer to detect disk images and display them in the internal library. Well, let's take this opportunity.

After scanning, all possible virtual CD / DVD and hard disks will be visible in the program window. Please select required type, open the context menu and execute the "Mount" command.

As before, disk images can be added to the Daemon Tools interface one by one using the quick mount button.

To unmount a virtual drive, call the context menu on its connection icon at the bottom of the program window and select the appropriate command.

How to mount an image in UltraISO

UltraISO is a mega-program designed for professional use. Among its features are such as: creating images of CD / DVD-disks, burning them to disc and editing without unpacking, optimizing the structure in order to save space, converting from one format to another, etc. This program is also a reliable and proven tool for creating bootable USB drives.

UltraISO is a paid software product. The free trial version is of little use when it comes to making full use of most of the features. So, the trial version has limitations, due to which it will not be possible to create or burn an ISO file, the weight of which is more than 300 MB. In our case, when we are talking purely about mounting a disk image to a virtual drive, this limitation does not apply. Therefore, you can safely download the trial version with the Russian-language interface from the UltraISO developer's site.

After launching UltraISO, you will see a small window telling us about the limitations of the trial version and encouraging us to buy the paid version. We press the button "Trial period".

In the program window, open the "File" menu and press the "Open" button.

Add the image file.

We open the "Tools" menu and select "Mount to virtual drive" among the commands present.

A small window will appear where you need to select the mount button. The button next to it - "Unmount" - must be used, respectively, to extract the CD / DVD image from the virtual drive.

How to burn an image to disk in Alcohol 52%

Alcohol 52% Free Edition is a stripped-down free version famous program to emulate CD / DVD Alcohol 120%. Unlike the latter, the paid Alcohol 52% allows you to mount a limited number of virtual drives at the same time - up to 6 pieces. In the free version of Alcohol 52% Free Edition, this number is completely reduced to a minimum - only 2 parallel virtual drives. Also free version does not provide for burning discs to discs.

A free trial version of the utility can be downloaded from the developer's official website.

At the time of writing this article, it was not possible to download the installer of the program with the browser loader, but the problem was successfully solved using the download manager Download Master.

Tricks of developers who want to buy from them paid versions software products, there are no boundaries. In the case of the trial version of Alcohol 52%, we will not just look at the demo window with an offer to buy full version programs, but you will even have to wait a few seconds until the button for launching the program "Ok" becomes active.

In the Alcohol 52% window, open the File menu and select Open.

Add required file into the program window, open the context menu on it and select the "Mount to device" command.

To extract an image from a virtual drive, open the context menu again and select the "Unmount ..." command, respectively.

The fastest way to mount and unmount a virtual drive

The above discussed ways of working with virtual drives inside programs. But there is also a more convenient, more quick way mount and unmount the virtual drive. If during installation Daemon Tools Lite is registered as a program that opens ISO files by default, you can mount the drive by opening the image as a regular file by double-clicking the mouse from the system explorer. In case of with UltraISO the disk image will be instantly added to the program window for further actions. But Alcohol 52% will simply open, as with a normal launch, however, it is also convenient.

If the program was not assigned by default during installation, you can do it manually at any time. To assign a program that opens this or that type by default ISO files, find any of them in Windows Explorer and select Properties from the context menu.

Click the change application button.

If the desired program not in the list, select "Advanced", go down to the end of the list and click the search option for another application.

Specify the program launch file in the installation folder.

Apply changes.

Now, in the system explorer, the CD / DVD image file will be displayed as the program's icon by default and will open in this program when it starts.

The easiest way to unmount the virtual drive is in the system explorer. Among the teams context menu called on the mounted drive, there is a function to eject the disc.