These are actual drives that are registered with Windows and assigned a drive letter. Virtual drives can be created and then discarded, but they don’t have to be. If you’ll only use a disc once, for instance, you can do so without using up a disc, and if you have a CD or DVD you use frequently, you can use a virtual copy instead and put the original physical copy somewhere for safekeeping. This means that you can read a disc image without burning a disc, which has many applications. Mounting an image on a virtual drive means that you’re instructing the virtual drive to read the disk image as a physical drive would read a physical disc. As far as Windows is concerned, there’s no distinction between virtual and physical drives and disc images. The purpose of a virtual drive is to read, and even write to, virtual images of CDs and DVDs rather than physical media.

DAEMON Tools Lite is an application that helps you create and manage virtual drives.Ī virtual drive, such as a virtual CD-ROM or DVD-ROM, is a simulated version of an actual physical optical drive that a computer can use to read CDs and DVDs.

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