Pankaj Kumar's Weblog

Every now and then I need to download, install and experiment with Windows only enterprise software products as part my job. Often these software products are distributed as ISO image files. These are opaque files and need to be burned into a CD before one can see inside these and install the software. Or at least this is what I thought till yesterday when I found out about a free utility for Windows XP distributed by Microsoft that lets you mount an ISO image file and map to an unused Windows drive. Here are the steps to download and use this free utility known as "Virtual CD Control Panel":

1. Download the Virtual CD Control Panel bits from microsoft site. What you get is a .exe file that creates three files when executed: VCdControlTool.exe, VCdRom.sys and readme.txt.
2. Follow the instructions in readme.txt to load the driver and mount the ISO file as a Windows drive. You would actually need to closely follow the steps as the UI is not very intuitive. One thing I did notice that there was no need to actually copy the VCdRom.sys file to %systemroot%\system32\drivers folder.

Not the best tool I have come across but what I can say is that this has been saving me a lot of time and money (in wasted CD ROMs) lately.