Microsoft Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel

  • Tutorial
With a certain amount of regret, I sometimes have to notice that kind people are sometimes inclined to tamper with a large set of programs for interacting with optical drives and laser disk images (say, a set of Nero or Alcohol 120% programs ), although they only need to perform one simple task - for example , just connect the ISO-image (an exact copy of a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM) as a virtual disk, that is, to make this image in Windows look like an additional CD-drive (DVD-drive) with a disc inserted in it .

And if for working with optical drivesand using laser disks is not a pirated program, but a free one (say, CDBurnerXP or ImgBurn), it often happens that this program is too simple, that is, it can usually create disk images and sometimes even convert images that are created in other programs (for example, it can make the ISO format from the NRG format), but it can’t cope with the connection of virtual disks.

Both of these problems under Windows XP Home or Windows XP Professional can be solved using a simple and  very  small archive file that is freely distributed by Microsoft from its website. It’s just over thereclick on the link “Download the Microsoft Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel package now”. This archive is self-extracting, it takes 59 kilobytes (!) And contains three files: a text file with installation instructions, a SYS file for copying to the SYSTEM32 / DRIVERS directory (this SYS file contains the virtual disk driver itself), and an EXE file consoles for managing both the driver (installation, uninstallation), and those ISO images,which are “pushed” into the virtual optical drive (you can insert them, you can remove them, you can create new drive letters, you can see which image was last inserted, and so on).

(The driver understands only ISO images, but you can use the aforementioned CDBurnerXP to convert other images to ISO , for example.)

It remains only to marvel at the fact that Microsoft did not include this driver ahead of time in Microsoft Windows XP, and that there are no analogues it is for Vista and for Windows 7. Any cryptoconspirologist could immediately smell in these circumstances the aroma of collusion with manufacturers of expensive virtual sidyushnikov, for example.

The news of the Microsoft virtual CD this February already appeared on Habrahabr, but "repeat good and repeat again."

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