With the advent of ultra portable machines and netbooks nowadays, more and more machines do not have built in DVD-ROM drives anymore. But as most of you would know, there are times when you need to load/install something from a CD/DVD disk, and without proper tools, it would be fairly troublesome.
Enter Virtual CD/DVD Drive apps. These apps cheat the OS to believe that there is an actual drive on the system. Then you just make images of your discs and mount them in the simulated drives. Not only it is helpful for machines without CD/DVD-ROMs, it is also convenient (even if your machine have the drive) such that you don't have to always lug a bunch of discs around. Just make image copies of what you need and store them in your hard disk, and you can have them at your fingertips whenever needed.
There are a variety of such applications out there, the more famous ones would be Alcohol 120%, CloneCD/CloneDVD, DaemonTools, PowerISO, UltraISO etc. Most of them are quite feature rich, allowing you to have multiple virtual drives, and some even allow you to create and/or edit images (ISO, BIN/CUE, DAA etc) from discs.
You could go ahead and try any of the above mentioned apps, but today I'm going to introduce you something a little more special. It is called KernSafe TotalMounter. What sets this apart from the rest is it's ability to simulate a DVD-RW. Yup, while most of the apps mentioned above can simulate DVD-ROMs, this one can also simulate a DVD-RW. This comes in useful when you have apps that requires you to output data to DVDs. In such case, you just need to mount an empty image, then let your application write to the simulated drive as if there is a blank disc.
In conclusion, this is somewhat of a niche application because nowadays, most installer supports boot/installation from USB thumbdrives. But it is still useful once in a while just to make life easier.
