Microsoft Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel

With a certain bit of regret, I sometimes have to notice that good people sometimes tend to discard a large complex of programs for interacting with optical drives and laser disk images (say, the Nero or Alcohol 120% software suite ), although they need to perform only one simple task - for example , just connect an ISO image (an exact copy of a CD or DVD) as a virtual disk, that is, to make this image in Windows look like an additional CD drive (DVD drive) with a disk inserted into it .

And if it’s not a pirated program that is used for working with optical drives and laser discs (for example, CDBurnerXP or ImgBurn), it is often the case that this program is too simple, that is, it can, as a rule, create images of disks and sometimes even convert those images that are created in other programs (for example, from the NRG format can make the ISO format), but can not 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 distributed by Microsoft Corporation from its website for free. All you have to do is click on the “Download the Microsoft Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel package now” hyperlink. This archive is self-extracting, it occupies 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 to manage both the driver (installation, installation), and those ISO images that “insert” 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 Further).
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(The driver understands only ISO images, but you can use the above-mentioned CDBurnerXP to convert other images to ISO, for example.)

It remains only to be astonished that Microsoft's drivers did not include this driver ahead of time in Microsoft Windows XP, and that its counterparts for Vista and Windows 7 are not near. Any cryptoconspirologist could immediately sense the flavor of collusion with manufacturers of expensive virtual computers in these circumstances. Sidyushnikov, for example.

The news of the Microsoft's virtual CD this February already appeared on Habrahabr, but “repeat the good and repeat it again”.