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General discussion

External hard drive used as virtual cd drive?

by Zdenka Jul 3, 2005 10:09PM PDT

Hi,

I am trying to find a way of using my external hard drive as a virtual cd drive. I am running a program that requires about 70 cd's and was the sole reason for purchasing the external hard drive.

I thought great, I'll copy them all to my external hard drive and won't have to do so much cd swapping anymore - wrong! When I run the program now, it still asks for cd's! A friend recommended installing cd emulation software, but I have been unable to find one that would install on external hard drive - it would always add another virtual cd/dvd drive to the system, which is no use to me as all the cd's are copied to my external hard drive.

I am running Window Xp home, my external hard drive is Maxtor One Touch 120Gb.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Discussion is locked

5 Posts
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Ask the program's author or company for a fix.
by r. proffitt Forum moderator Jul 3, 2005 11:39PM PDT

I can safely bet the authors or programmers at said company have a hard disk install method. Don't pass up on what could be an easy fix.

Bob

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External HDD as virtual cd drive?
by Zdenka Jul 4, 2005 1:04AM PDT

Hi,

Unfortunatelly not an option. The software is used for genealogy and it is actually terribly out of date as it is DOS-based.

There is going to be a new version released sometime within next 18 months - by then rendering it obsolete as the information will be available online as well.

I'm half-way trough copying the cd's...

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Look at Alcohol 120%.
by r. proffitt Forum moderator Jul 4, 2005 2:14AM PDT

Your method of copying may be a waste of time if you use the usual tools such as I noted. Instead they work with disk images and have their own tool to read the image to be mounted with their menus. Frankly, while it may work, it may not and you may not care to work with Alcohol 120%'s menu to mount each image as its needed.

Try this. Just copy all the CDs into the same directory and see if it runs.

Bob

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Unfortunately...
by jackintucson Jul 5, 2005 9:41AM PDT

this software may have been 'hard-coded' to only accept cd-roms, each with a specific 'header' to identify it as the one requested. And the software is addressing a specific port for the proper response to the programs query. If what Bob suggested doesn't work, you might have to settle for another geneology program.

and life goes on...

Jack

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Virtual Drive9 www.farstone.com
by rfitzva Jul 8, 2005 5:24AM PDT

try a free trial of Virtual Drive 9 from www.farstone.com.

Also EasyMediaCreator 7.5 has support for accessing .iso files.

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