Okay, so you've just created an ISO CD image in Easy CD and you'd like to run it from your hard drive without having to burn it to a CD and then copy it back. You've got that nifty Virtual CD-ROM program that will let you run CDs from your hard drive, but you don't want to have to burn the ISO file to a blank CD just so you can copy it back to your hard drive as a Virtual CD. (I can't count the number of blanks I wasted doing that.) Well, here's what you do:
Download ISO2FCD, a free utility by Volker Voss. Then, using Windows explorer, drag the ISO file onto ISO2FCD.EXE and type in the file name for your new Virtual CD (FCD) file. Then just go into Virtual CD and add the new FCD file to your list.
Does your CDR software make BIN files instead of ISO files? Click here to visit my BIN Chunker minipage.
Want it to be a compressed virtual CD? Just create a new virtual CD, using the uncompressed one as the source CD! (you'll need to use sector read scan mode)
Want to convert a virtual CD back into an ISO? Click here to visit my FCD2ISO minipage.
Warning: There is a special CD format called "Mode 2" or "Multisession" which is readable mostly just by CDR and CDRW drives. ISO2FCD doesn't convert Multisession/Mode2 ISO images properly. Normally you only run across this format when whoever created the ISO image didn't care if a normal CD-ROM drive could read the CD. Make sure you always use "Mode 1" when creating ISO images.
Note: If you have a Mode 2 ISO file you need to turn into a Virtual CD, you can use the following procedure:
1) Download a shareware program called WinImage from http://www.winimage.com.
2) Use WinImage to extract all the files from the Mode 2 ISO file.
3) Download Virtual CD-ROM Enhancer here.
4) Use Virtual CD-ROM Enhancer to make the files into a Virtual CD.