Mounting ISO files virtually

Like many MSDN customers, I have a large on-line collection of ISO images of most MS products, for installation onto my test networks. They work great for Virtual Machines - you can just mount the ISO as easily as putting a real CD/DVD into a physical drive.

MS released a cool tool to beta testers years ago called VCD (Virtual CD), which allows you to mount the ISO into your real system. I always thought it was a beta-only release - thanks to a pointer from fellow MVP Duncan McAlynn's blog, it looks likle MS have released it on the download site.

This is one of those "must have" tools in every admins tool box.

The download is an self extracting .exe and contains three files. There's a short readme.txt file, plus a front end (VCdControlTool.exe) and a driver (VcdRom.sys). Naturally, you need the appropriate rights to load drivers in order to use VCD.