Starting from Windows 7, Microsoft Windows has in-built support for the ISO disk image format. You can mount an ISO image in Windows as a disk drive and access all the contents of the disk images as if you have burned the ISO image on a real CD/DVD and are using it through an optical drive. You can also burn an ISO image on to a blank CD/DVD media. But there is no support for some other types of disk images like IMG, NRG or BIN formats.
If you have come across any of these other disk image files and want to mount them as virtual disk drives, then you can use the free software VirtualDrive. This free software supports CloneCD (*.ccd), CDRWin (*.bin), Cue Sheets (*.cue), CDImage (*.img), ISO (*.iso), BlindRead (*.bwt), BlindWrite (*.b5t; *.b6t), Alcohol 120% Image (*.mds;*.mdf), Disc Juggler (*.cdi), Instant CD/DVD (*.pdi), Compressed ISO (*.isz), Nero (*.nrg), CloneDVD (*.dvd), CDSpace6 (*.LCD), Media Data eXtended (*.MDX), Media Descriptor Sidecar(*.MDS).
So no matter which of the disk imaging software you have used previously to create these CD/DVD disk images, you can mount them using VirtualDrive. After the installation of the VirtualDrive software in Windows, you will see a new Blu-Ray drive in your system. But it can create more virtual drives if you want to mount more than one disk image. Actually, it can emulate up to a maximum of 24 such virtual disk drives if you set the device count from the preferences.
In order to mount the disk images, you can either double-click on the disk image itself, or you can right-click on the VirtualDrive icon in the system tray and choose the mount option from there. The unmounting of disk images is similar – you can either eject the optical media from the File Explorer or you can use the unmount option from the system tray icon of VirtualDrive.
Conclusion: VirtualDrive is great for quickly testing a downloaded disk image that is not in the standard ISO format. It is free, uses little system resources and supports a wide variety of disk image formats.
You can download VirtualDrive from http://ohsoft.net/eng/vdvd/download.php?cate=1003.