Alcohol 120%

Woden

Hi not sure if anyone is familiar with this piece of software known as Alcohol 120% its a cd burning softare similar to clonecd and blindwrite anywho issue with it in that on installation it installs a virtual dvd drive, so known i have 2 dvd drives and a cd-rw drive and all three are visible in the my computer screen. Anyone know why it does this? is it necessary for the operation of the program? etc.

Cheers

Data

Mr E

Don't think its a CD writer, Dataisgod (if it is, I didn't know about it!).

Alcohol 120% is a program that will mount a CD image (ISO or whatever) and assign a drive letter to it.

So, for example, if you have a CD image of Unreal 2 on your harddrive, you can mount it using Alcohol120% (where it will assign a drive letter -- you can see it in explorer) and install as you would from a real CD (without actually having to burn onto a real CD).

- Dave.

Woden

eh not sure if i really get you but i use alcohol to burn physically burns cd's (actually i think its one of only a few that can do safedisc 2.8) i should have an virtual drive then though if what you say is true, as alcohol is set to delete any images after burning?

cheers

Data

KdjaCL

It works the same way as Daemon tools and Clonecd.

Its bascialy both in one.

The new protections on cds mean the game "knows " if your using a non original cd ,so the extra drive is where you install it from.

Never heard of anyone using it to burn just mount the image and install.

kdjac

Woden

i'm telling you folks its a burn software also, i think see how you can mount images although not completely sure what that means, you open alcohol and you get options, like image making wizard and image burning wizard, it works a charm and there is a nice drop down menu for picking the settings for safedisk, securom etc. there is something about a virtual device though

KdjaCL

yah virtual device is creating another drive ,say you had DSL and dloaded a 700mb BIN file rather than burning it you run it (mount) it in the virtual device then you click on yhe new G drive install starts and the game installs but the computer is telling the game this is a legit cd from a legit drive so as long as that image is mounted you dont need a no cd crack.

kdjac

Mr E

Just loaded it. There are options to burn CDs, but thats not the beauty of the program (6,000,000 other programs can burn CDs). Its the virtual CD functionality that makes this program a bit special...

Pimp Ninja

Thats exactly what I use it for... he Virtual CD jobby...

Trys to explain in english.
You can create the CD image on your hard drive, and in stead of burning the image to a blank CD, you leave the image file on your hard drive, and use Alcohol 120% to mount the CD image to the virtual drive.

Windows then thinks that you've just put the cd into a drive, when in actual fact you've only mounted an image into the software.

Its a great application for network installs of software, all you need to is have the images on a fileserver accessable to the network, then when you want to install/run an application, requiring the cd, copy the image to the local machine and mount it.

*also good for warez at lans, but I didnt say that

Woden

"thats not the beauty of the program (6,000,000 other programs can burn CDs)."

that maybe the case but to the best of my knowledge alcohol120% is one of a tiny amount of those 6,000,000 programs that does safedisc 2.8.

thanks for the replies i think i c what the virtual drive can be used for now but personally i can't see my self having much use for it.
can it be deleted without affecting the operation of the program?

Mr E

Alcohol runs in the system tray. When you shut it down, the virtual drive vanishes.

If you try to run a game/program which requires access to the CD (after you've closed alcohol), then the game won't run - it will say "insert disk in drive E:" (or whatever the virtual drive was). All the registry entries pertaining to the installation will refer to the virtual drive.

- Dave.

oneweb

Is that what the mount option does in Windows 2000 disk managagement? IE, does it create a virtual drive using CD files?

Woden

so TmB if i use system mechanic i can disable the boot-up of alcohol the virtual drive should not be present? clarification is the system tray the notification area in the bottom right corne of the task bar in XP, as alcohol is not present there?