Use CD without a drive at SimpleBusiness.org

Imagine this, you have two CD that you need to alternately access data from. You have only one CD drive. Now, what if you have programs that need to run from these CDs?

Frustrating.

Not anymore for me. Daemon Tools comes to the rescue.

Daemon-Tools is a virtual CD emulator or a CD imag mounter. Sounds techy, what does it do? Well, it does a two things that might be very interesting to a user.

It allows reading a CD without a CD drive
It allows reading multiple CDs without CD drive

But in order to do that, first a CD image had to be created. A CD image is, well, an image of a CD. Simply, it is a digital copy of the CD stored on the harddisk. To create it a tool like Nero is needed. There might be an open source program for that but I do not know any.

"Mount" is a term used quite frequently in unix but a Windows user may not know what it means. It roughly means "connecting to read it". So mounting a CD drive means connecting to the drive so that the system can read information from it.

Similarly mounting a CD image means connecting to the image so that information on the image file can be read. If it is a data disk, think if the image as a big zip file and Daemon-Tool as a program that will allow you to access the files in the zip file.

Effectively, Daemon-Tools emulate ("pretend to be") a CD drive. With it and the CD images you can read the content of a CD without a drive. The mounted image will appear as a drive letter just like a normal CD. Programs can files can be access on it like a normal CD.

What more interesting is that multiple images can be mounted at the same time. Now you how the original frustrating problem can be solved. Just mount the 2 CD images (or create one image and put the other CD in the drive) and youcan access data from both disc at the same time. No swapping.