WinCDEmu is a free open source program for the Microsoft Windows operating system that enables you to mount iso images and other disk formats.
Virtual CD drives provide you with options to mount iso images and other disk formats directly on a computer system.
The approach offers several benefits over burning ISO images to optical disc or storing them on USB Flash Drives.
Obviously, you can access data that is on the disc without burning it or extracting it. Additionally, it is possible to mount images on devices that don’t have optical drives connected to them, or no USB ports as long as they support image mounting software.
Images may also be used as backup copies of optical discs. So, instead of carrying your children’s favorite movies with you on DVD or Blu-Ray, you would do so using images instead. No more scratches or misplaced discs anymore.
Mount ISO Images
WinCDEmu is an Open Source software program that can mount iso images but also cue, bin, raw, img and smb network shares.
It is probably the easiest to use of all the different virtual disc applications.
You need to install the program first on a Windows machine, and may select a different directory for the program or set it up to require UAC confirmation whenever images are mounted.
You mount supported disc formats either via double-click on the image on the computer, or by right-clicking on the file and selecting “select driver letter & mount”, or “mount to an existing virtual drive”.
The former lets you pick a drive letter for the image, the latter will replace an already mounted image with the new one.
From then on out, you may access the contents of the drive in the same way you access other drives on the device.
One issue that you may experience is that WinCDEmu won’t associate itself with supported image file types by default so that double-clicking won’t work initially.
You need to associate the file types manually on Windows for that.
You may disconnect (unmount) any mounted disc image by right-clicking on the virtual drive in Windows and selecting eject from the context menu.
Closing Words
WinCDEmu is a straightforward software program to mount iso images and other disk formats. The program supports all 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system.
The program ships without graphical user interface as it adds all its functionality to Windows Explorer / File Explorer. Since that is the program that most Windows users use anyway when it comes to files and such, it is one of the reasons why it is easy to use.
Users who prefer a portable version of the program can download it from the developer website as well.