Kerkia

Background

The regular way of enjoying the content of a CD or DVD on your computer is to insert it and then play it. But then you could want to also convert those disks into ISO images (this format is the most widespread one, hence used here for the purpose of explaining), which are like images of your whole disk and are in the form of a file with a .iso extension. Once on your computer, you can use those .iso files exactly as if they were the actual drive, and play your virtual drives that way. This actually tends to be more efficient and the nice thing is also that you can have many of those virtual drives mounted at the same time. This can be used for many purposes such as back-up of your disks, playing disks without using/damaging them, playing from the computer without needing to burn new discs, running disks without a disk drive, making disks available over a LAN, etc.

Recommendation

Several tools that focus on burning disks or converting format also allow using ISO files as virtual disks. We however would like to recommend here a tool that focuses on this only and does a very job at it. MagicDisc is a little bit difficult to find on the MagicIso web site, probably because this is a freeware tool unlike other software tools on that site, but it is nevertheless maintained and works very well. It manages multiple formats besides just the standard ISO format, pretty much all of them and this is actually one of its key strengths, and allows you to mount up to 15 virtual drives simultaneously. It works with all major OSs including Windows 7 both 32 and 64 bits.

Web links

MagicDisc

Web site: http://www.magiciso.com/tutorials/miso-magicdisc-overview.htm

Download: http://www.magiciso.com/tutorials/miso-magicdisc-history.htm