Virtual drive

A Virtual drive is a term associated to computers when a drive, be it optical disk or hard drive, is emulated in some fashion. Some of the drives that can be emulated include hard drives, floppy drives, CD/DVD drives or network shares. A virtual drive can also be created from RAM for fast read/write access. These drives are called RAM drives.

Virtual DVDs are often mounted as disk images via some sort of disk image emulation software. Known softwares are Daemon tools and programs like Alcohol 120%. Mounting the disk image allows reading of the content of the CD or DVD from the disk image on the hard drive rather than on the disk itself. It also allows users to run software as if the registered copy of the disk were in the disk drive itself.

A virtual CD burner is a device 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. The disk image can either than be burned directly to disk or compressed to form a CSO image file.