Mounting ISO images in your OS is a great way for you to view and run the content of the disk image without having to burn it into a CD/DVD. While Mac and Linux come with native support to mount ISO images in the system, Windows, regardless which version you are using, doesn’t come with this feature. In this article, we will show you how to mount ISO image file in your Windows at a price of free.
If you are one of those who do not have a CD / DVD burner or do not want to burn the image on a CD / DVD, you can still access the files inside the ISO image by mounting the ISO image to virtual CD/DVD drive with MagicDisc. It works and behaves just like a physical CD / DVD drive.
MagicDisc is a freeware that allows you to mount ISO files as a virtual CD or DVD drive.
You can mount up to 15 virtual CD / DVD drives using MagicDisc. In addition to this you can also create a image file (ISO) from a existing CD or DVD. Usage is pretty simple. Once you have installed the software. It will show up as a tray icon.
Right clicking on the icon will load a new menu using which you can mount or unmount and image files as a virtual CD / DVD drive. Selecting the virtual drive will show you options to mount or unmount the drive.
Clicking on mount will open a file dialog from where you can choose the image file and mount it as a virtual drive and will appear in your Windows Explorer. You can then install the software or copy the files inside the mounted drive. Once you have finished use of the mounted drive you can simply click on the Unmount option to unmount the drive.
This is a very useful software as it supports many different types of image files along with supporting the default ISO files
- BIN (CDRWin)
- IMA/IMG (Generic disk images)
- CIF (Easy CD Creator)
- NRG (Nero – Burning ROM)
- IMG/CCD (CloneCD)
- MDF/MDS (Fantom CD)
- VCD (Farstone Virtual Drive)
- VaporCD (Noum Vapor CDROM)
- P01/MD1/XA (Gear)
- VC4/000 (Virtual CD)
- VDI (Virtuo CD Manager)
- C2D (WinOnCD)
- BWI/BWT (BlinkWrite)
- CDI (DiscJuggler)
- TAO/DAO (Duplicator)
- PDI (Instant Copy)
MagicDisc will work on Windows 7/Vista/XP.