Virtual drive
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A virtual drive is a term used with respect to computers when a drive is emulated in some fashion. The drive being emulated could be a hard drive, floppy drive, CD/DVD or a network share among others.
A virtual hard drive can be created from RAM for fast read/write access. See: RAM disk.
Virtual DVDs are often mounted as disk images via disk image emulator software. This allows the content of a CD or DVD to be read from the disk image on a hard drive, rather than a disc drive. This may also allow users to run software that requires a CD or a DVD, without the need of having a registered copy in the disc drive.
Virtual Hard Disk
A virtual hard disk can be useful to map a network device into a device that appears like a real hard disk. There is currently no hard disk emulator known. A work around can be to use encryption software such as TrueCrypt to mount a file on a network device so it appears like a physical hard disk.
Another possibility for a virtual hard disk is webdav, however it does not exactly act like a physical disk.
Storage ordinary connected by FTP, SFTP and SSH can be also mapped as a virtual drive with a software called 'netdrive' or 'sftpdrive'.
Virtual Burner
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A virtual CD burner is a device driver that emulates a CD/DVD Burner. It appears as another drive in the system with writing capabilities. When information is written to the drive, it creates an ISO Image representation of the CD that would, under normal circumstances, be physically created. ISO images can be compressed into CSO images for compressed .iso images.
This allows you to use any CD burning software to create what can be later mounted as a virtual drive.
See also
External links
- DAEMON Tools - The Free Virtual CD/DVD-ROM-Emulator .
- MagicDisc - Freeware virtual CD-ROM program for Windows 9x/Me/2000/XP/2003/Vista
- CD Emulator - free virtual CD-ROM program for Windows XP (and unofficially Windows 2000) from Microsoft.
- Floppy Drive Emulator - free virtual Floppy Drive program for Windows NT/2000/XP/2003. It only works on 32 bit systems.
- Alcohol Backup & Emulation software
- Semi-Virtual Diskette (SVD) - a vintage hardware floppy drive/image emulator.