|
CD-Roms on the Hard Disk
Take all your CDs with you on the hard drive of the laptop
Introduction
I have a lot of CDs and DVDs, which I want to use also on the go, like my English-Hungarian dictionary, map for Budapest, my older encyclopedias like MS Encarta 95 and Britannica 96, etc. They take up a lot of space in my bag and I also got tired of looking up the disks, put it into the cd tray, wait for the disc to spin up, change to another disk.
So I looked up an easy to use solution. I made 1:1 copies of the disks onto my external hard drive and mount these images into a virtual CD-rom drive. For my English-Hungarian dictionary, I have eng-hun.iso on my hard drive, I double click on it, and then it auto loads into the virtual CD-rom drive H:. When I want to change to another disk, like for the map of Budapest, as I just click on budapestmap.iso it loads to H: and is ready to use.
Advantages of this method (+):
Disadvantages (-):
Necessary applications:
Instead of a step-by-step guide, let me just tell you how to use these four applications.
MagicISO
With MagicISO, you can:
The feature I use the most often in MagicISO is to open existing images and delete out files and folders I don't want to save space, like Acrobat reader installations, software try-outs, etc.
Iso format is a general reliable format, there are plugins to read/write inside the image even for Total Commander. However, when copy protection is important to be stored in the image file, you will need to use the raw format .bin, which stores an exact 1:1 copy of the disc, with some compression if possible.
Deamon-tools
After you install d-tools, you will see a small red icon in the system tray. 
Let's configure it up:
To manually mount an image:
Because it takes a lot of effort to change the image files this way, there are several applications to ease the process. I prefer Fastmount, but there are other apps on the Daemon-tools homepage under Download \ 3rd Party Add-ons for V4-Series.
Fastmount
Fastmount associates the common extensions for image files to Deamon-tools (or other optical drive emulator program, like Alcohol, or Nero), so I don't have to right click and browse through the menus in Deamon-tools.
There is an option in the bottom "I'm using only one single virtual drive". I take advantage of this option, because this way simply double-clicking on images mounts them directly to the first virtual drive. If I disable this option, Fastmount will pop-up a window to ask for the device number.
Slysoft CloneCD
There's nothing extra that CloneCD would offer over MagicISO, however I like this program because it's so simple to use. I use it to make exact 1:1 copies 'on-the-fly' and to burn existing images of my backups onto DVD-RWs. Unlike it's name, it can deal with both CDs and DVDs. To rip CDs, it's OK, however, when I rip DVD images onto the hard drive, it creates 4-5 files of 1 GB like a multi part zip, which I can only use with CloneCD afterwards.
To make copies of CD images onto real CDs, usually just mount the image into Daemon-tools and make a copy 'on-the-fly' with CloneCD.
Other two applications I like to use:
Links
Last edited on 20-Jan-2006.
(c) Imre Oliver Kozak and @Foxpop.
