Mount ISOs, MDFs as Drive letters: Alcohol 52% 1.9.6

Alcohol 52%
http://www.alcohol-soft.com/


If you've ever needed to archive your CD's and DVD's for backup purposes, you know that easily accessing those archives sometimes can be tedious.

Archiving...Zip or otherwise?
Some people like to archive their discs using a ZIP compression program, which is fine, unless you need to retain certain specialized characteristics of the disc, such as whether the disc is bootable or not. In these cases, you most likely have created an ISO or equivalent file backup of the disc in question.

Some businesses have begun to archive their disc images and store them to low cost drive arrays (SATA) so they do not have to locate the discs whenever someone needs to access them years down the road. But, how to do this easily? You just need a way of accessing the files from these disc images - - perhaps even mounting them as a drive letter, so you can run your games or access archived data without physically having to dig through that huge CD/DVD collection.

This is where a program like Alcohol 52% comes into play.

Alcohol 52% is the "watered down" brother to 120% (which has many more features), and can mount a variety of archived disc types such as mds, ccd, cue, bwt, iso, cdi, nrg, pdi, b5t, and isz. Don't get me wrong, "watered down" doesn't mean 'weak' in this case!

Disc image management
As you can see below, you can manage your list of accessible disc images in the main Alcohol 52% interface, mounting an image is as simple as dragging and dropping it to your virtual drive in the lower pane. If you aren't sure where your images are located, you can use the 'Image Finder' feature and have Alcohol 52% search for you.

Alcohol can make you creative, but we knew that, right?
Not only can you mount disc images, but you can create them as well! Alcohol 52% gives you the ability to archive to a file, using the 'Image Making Wizard'. Depending on what is on the disc, you can write to a few different formats (including iso). For free, this program fills a needed niche, and does it well!

Just don't expect Alcohol 52% to make you a good dancer.

More virtual drives? No problem!
You can also use Alcohol 52% to create new virtual drives to mount multiple images at a time. So, if you need to access 3 different disc images during that big presentation, you can easily do it (and even mount them on the fly with hotkey combos, too!). Just click the 'Virtual Drive' option in the left-hand pane of the main window, and set up your multiple drives (limit of 6, Alcohol 120% gives you 31!).

Business case
For business users, the benefit of this software is that you can make a CD backup of a major presentation or demo disc, without actually having to keep your physical media with you, increasing the chance of damaging the disc.

Alternates:

• Daemon Tools (be careful of the toolbar that you are prompted with during the install!)
• Microsoft ISO mounting tool (definitely NOT pretty)
• ImgBurn
• Others...