Virtual Drives

I find these very useful.

What are Virtual Drives
Virtual Drives are simulated 'real' drives. They act very similar to a real drive : Windows recognizes it as a real drive and it can read just like a real drive. Except with virtual drives you must load images of CDs or DVDs onto them to make them work. Images are created by burning applications like CloneCD and Alcohol and the images, when loaded onto virtual drives, normally give an indication how the CD is going to act when the image is burned to a real CD.

Some well known virtual drives are :
Daemon Tools' Virtual Drive
Downloadable at http://www.daemon-tools.cc
Daemon Tool's Virtual Drive can be activated from the Daemon Tools Menu.
This will create a drive that looks real in My Computer and such.

CloneCD's Virtual CloneDrive
Downloadable at http://www.oldversion.com
This is a feature only seen in CloneCD 4.2.0.2 and down. It was taken out when Elby handed CloneCD over to SlySoft. This can be activated from the System Tray. That is accessible by going to Start>All Programs/Program Files>CloneCD>CloneCD Tray.

Please Note : Most/All new protections have this Blacklisted.

Alcohol 120%'s Virtual Drive
Downloadable at http://www.alcohol-soft.com
This can be enabled by clicking the virtual drive button to the left.
This is not really apparent. SafeDisc 3.20 and Latest versions of SecuROM 5 have the 1.9.2 version Blacklisted.