Open Source is the trick to this question and to be honest I don’t know of any off the top of my head, though if your looking for a virtual drive thats open source then I would guess you run in circles more knowledgeable then Yahoo! Answers. If your just looking for a free alternative then I’d suggest:
Daemon Tools Lite (Has only failed me twice, and those were tricky ISO’s)***
UltraISO, good but not great
PowerISO, once again, good but not amazing
MagicDrive, I find this to be garbage due to crappy run times, errors loading and several other issues, but its free so can’t really complain.
There are many, many pieces of crap out there when it comes to things like this. and the usually community that demands the product leads to most of the sources being riddled with viruses. Try Daemon Tools LITE not standard, LITE unless you know about things like ISOHunt or PirateBay, then go pro by all means (not that i encourage that sort of thing). Good luck.
There’s a little-known open source utility that can be used to create and/or mount virtual CD/DVD/hard disk/floppy disk images:
It’s called ImDisk, and it’s at http://www.ltr-data.se/opencode.html#ImDisk
I’ve regularly used with an ISO file, and it works well for me. (Just remember to look for ImDisk in your Control Panel after installation–NOT your start menu programs!)
I hope this **open-source** suggestion works out well for you. (I’m the same way–if there’s a FOSS alternative that works, why use that other junk?)
August 23rd, 2010 | 
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I don’t know of any open-source alternatives for Windows, but there is Alcohol 52% free edition.
In Linux, you don’t need any additional software. Just use mount:
# mkdir -p /mnt/cdrom
# mount -o loop /path/to/file.iso /mnt/cdrom
Just use Alcohol 120% along with Magic Disc / Magic Iso
Daemon Tools mounts drives in much the same way as Alcohol120% and can be found here: http://www.daemon-tools.cc/
Open Source is the trick to this question and to be honest I don’t know of any off the top of my head, though if your looking for a virtual drive thats open source then I would guess you run in circles more knowledgeable then Yahoo! Answers. If your just looking for a free alternative then I’d suggest:
Daemon Tools Lite (Has only failed me twice, and those were tricky ISO’s)***
UltraISO, good but not great
PowerISO, once again, good but not amazing
MagicDrive, I find this to be garbage due to crappy run times, errors loading and several other issues, but its free so can’t really complain.
There are many, many pieces of crap out there when it comes to things like this. and the usually community that demands the product leads to most of the sources being riddled with viruses. Try Daemon Tools LITE not standard, LITE unless you know about things like ISOHunt or PirateBay, then go pro by all means (not that i encourage that sort of thing). Good luck.
There’s a little-known open source utility that can be used to create and/or mount virtual CD/DVD/hard disk/floppy disk images:
It’s called ImDisk, and it’s at http://www.ltr-data.se/opencode.html#ImDisk
I’ve regularly used with an ISO file, and it works well for me. (Just remember to look for ImDisk in your Control Panel after installation–NOT your start menu programs!)
I hope this **open-source** suggestion works out well for you. (I’m the same way–if there’s a FOSS alternative that works, why use that other junk?)
Best of luck to you.