SlySoft’s Virtual CloneDrive Offers Superb Disk Image Mounting

Yesterday, I posted about a cool little application that allowed you to both create and mount ISO disk images, but little did I realize, that application pales in comparison to some of the free competition. Thanks to one of our eagle-eyed readers, we now see what might be the ultimate free solution.

SlySoft, creators of the ultra-popular AnyDVD and CloneDVD applications, offer a completely free tool called “Virtual CloneDrive”, which improves upon ISODisk in almost every-single way. Rather than limit you to just the .ISO format, CloneDrive supports that, as well as DVD, CCD, IMG, UDF and BIN files. Nero’s NRG format isn’t supported, not surprisingly. I think it’s safe to say that by using proprietary formats like that, you are only going to suffer a headache down the road.

When launched, the application will offer a few simple questions, as seen below. You can select up to 15 virtual drives, which the OS will see as “BD-ROM Drive”. Yes, that’s right. This application doesn’t only mount CD and DVD images, but can also handle Blu-ray. You can also set the application to mount previously used images when next used, as well.

You can’t create images with this tool, but there are many others out there that can do it for you. CloneDrive definitely looks to be the best solution available for mounting disk images though, and you can’t beat the price. Thanks to Ron for the heads-up!

Virtual CloneDrive works and behaves just like a physical CD/DVD drive, however it exists only virtually. Image files generated with CloneDVD or CloneCD can be mounted onto a virtual drive from your hard-disk or from a network drive and used in the same manner as inserting them into a normal CD/DVD drive.