The results were various. Some of the copy-paste attempts were successful while others failed. When he asked me for a solution, I told him that simply copying the contents might not work for some discs. A better way would be to record them as disk images and then mount them using a virtual drive.

Why Would Anybody Want To Create A Disk Image?

The first time I met the concept of a disk image was in the late 90′s when I unsuccessfully tried to play a computer game without the CD. Back in those days, many software makers required that the installation/data CD’s were to be present in the tray before the application could run. If you used many applications and each one of them required several CD’s, repeatedly inserting and changing those CD’s could become very annoying. It would be much better if users transformed those CD’s into disk images and mount them using virtual drives.

Another advantage of using a combination of disk images and virtual drives is the number of virtual drives you can use. While normal computer users would never install 20 optical disc drives on their CPU, anybody can easily set up 20 virtual drives on their system.

Then there’s the performance issue. Running mounted disk images is faster and less resource hungry than letting the system read everything from the physical disc. This method also means a longer battery life for mobile computer users. Converting physical discs into disk images also means that you can use the discs virtually from any computer that doesn’t have an optical drive such as small netbooks.

Last but not least, after copying the discs as images, you can safely store them away and prolong their lifetime.

Creating Disk Images

Even though there are downloadable disk images on the web (Ubuntu Installer being one of them), the most common way to acquire disk images is by converting the real CDs with the help of disk imaging application. Most CD/DVD burner apps can accomplish the task, but one of the simplest free disk image software solutions that I found is ISO Recorder. This app will give you right-click access to create images.

• Downloading the tiny installer (less than 800KB) and installing the app will set you back only a few seconds.

• After that, creating disk images is as simple as right clicking on the inserted real disc and choosing “Create image from CD/DVD“.

• The next step is to choose the location to save the images.

• The app will replicate the disc. The process could take some time, depending on the size of the disc and the speed of your system.

• After the operation is completed, click the “Finish” button to exit ISO Recorder.

• Repeat the process to create more disk images.

Adding Virtual Drives

To mount disk images, you’ll need to add/create virtual drives using virtual drive tools. One of the easiest tools you can try is Virtual Clone Drive.

• During the setup, you can associate several disk image formats to be automatically opened with Virtual Clone Drive.

• The app will act as if it is installing a new hardware, so your computer will ask for your confirmation whether or not you want to continue with the installation.

• After installation, the app will quietly reside in the System Tray.

• Clicking on it will open the “Settings” window. There are several things you can customize here, but I think the most important one is the option to set up how many virtual drives you want to add to your system.

• After that, mounting the disk images to one of the available virtual drives is only a matter of right clicking on the disk images and choosing “Mount“.

Using a combination of disk images and virtual drives, you can create as many images as you want (provided you still have room on your hard drive), mount as many images as you need, and keep them open all the time if you want to.

Obviously, the two free disk image software tools mentioned above are not the only available options. There are many other alternatives you could try, including a couple that Tim recently highlighted. What are the disk imaging and/or virtual drive tools of your choice?  Please share them using the comments section below.

Unlike Windows, Linux has built-in support for mounting and manipulating image files. This means you don’t necessarily need third party software in order to access .ISO archives and the files contained within.

There are in fact a couple of ways of going about this, so you can choose a method which suits you.

ISO ISO Baby

The image file format has been a popular way of distributing software online since broadband speeds allowed us to do so. Chances are you installed your Linux distribution using an .ISO file, possibly one you prepared in good old Windows.

The .ISO file format simply archives the contents of an optical media disc using the ISO 9660 file system. It is also possible for these images to use the UDF (Universal Disc Format) file system in some cases. The data within the archive is uncompressed, and an .ISO image can be made from any optical media ““- CD, DVD, HD-DVD (remember those?), BluRay and so on.

It is not possible to use the .ISO file format to create an image of an audio CD as these do not use a computer filesystem. In these cases .BIN/.CUE image combinations are often preferred.

If you want to gain access to the files within an .ISO archive, first you’re going to need to mount it. You can either opt for the command-line method or you can use a program with a graphical interface if you’re not fond of text-based commands.

Some distributions may have provided software so you can extract via the right click menu. Before starting out, find your .ISO image, right click and look for the Extract Here option. You might just be pleasantly surprised!

Extracting an .ISO Using the Command Line

This isn’t as hard as it sounds, it’s just a matter of getting the syntax right in the command. First you’ll need to create a folder in which to mount the image, open your command line editor and enter:

sudo mkdir /mnt/iso

Enter you password when asked, and your directory will be created. Now we can mount the file by typing:

sudo mount -o loop <image>.iso /mnt/iso

Replace <image> with the location of your .ISO file, for example I mounted a file in my Downloads folder using

sudo mount -o loop /home/tim/Downloads/image1.iso /mnt/iso

Now you can navigate to the folder you created and access the files within the .ISO. If you want to grab the whole lot via the command line, you can copy the contents of the folder by typing:

sudo cp -r /mnt/iso /home/tim/Documents

This command would copy the whole lot to a separate “iso” folder in my Documents folder. The

-r

option instructs the operation to copy recursively, which includes folder contents.

You don’t necessarily need to do this of course, as once you have mounted it you can use your file manager to pick and choose the bits you want.

Note: If the command used here to mount your .ISO fails, you might want to also try:

mount -o loop -t iso9660 <image>.iso /mnt/iso

Extracting an .ISO Using Software

If the command line isn’t for you, there’s a couple of applications that mount and allow you to extract image files. They’re all free, as is the case with most Linux software.

Gmount-ISO

A simple graphical interface for the GTK+ environment that allows you to mount .ISO files in a directory of your choice. Input the path to your .ISO in the Image File field and the folder in which you’d like to display the contents in the Mount Point field.

Then simply click Mount and the contents of your image will appear in the directory that you specified.

Ubuntu and other distributions that use Synaptic can install via the command-line:

sudo apt-get install gmountiso

AcetoneISO

With support for a variety of image formats including .ISO, .BIN, .MDF and .NRG AcetoneISO is another powerful graphical interface for mounting and extracting.

AcetoneISO allows you to specify a folder in which your image files are located, or you can just choose Mount and point AcetoneISO to the right file.

Ubuntu and other distributions that use Synaptic can install via the command-line:

sudo apt-get install acetoneiso

Do you have any favourite image mounting programs? Do you use the command line method or a GUI? Let us know in the comments!

During the years of my interactions with computers, I’ve found and tried countless applications of various magnitudes; from the huge apps that can do everything to the small ones built to do only one thing. Here are several small and useful Mac utilities that you might not know even existed.

What’s Keeping Me?

Mounting and unmounting drives/volumes are a fact of everyday life for Mac users. So are deleting files and emptying Trash. But those actions don’t always go smoothly. Sometimes there are unknown things that prevent the process from being completed.

You’ll get a pop-up notification window every time a volume can’t be ejected.

Or whenever one or more files can’t be deleted from the Trash.

But the system doesn’t always tell you why. The most common reason is because there are some opened files inside the Volume/Trash. You can do a search from within What’s Keeping Me Mac utility to identify the application which prevents you from accomplishing your task. You can then quit, relaunch, or kill the problem application and continue with the unmounting/deleting process.

You can also install the automator workflow so that you can do the search directly from Finder. To use it, just right click on the file and choose “Service – WhatsKeepingMe Search“.

Volumizer

There’s another Mac utility that also deals with mounted volumes called Volumizer. This app is a Preference Pane add-on which provides a system-wide menu that displays all mounted volumes: hard drives, flash drives, optical discs, network volumes, disk images and other mountable items in the Finder.

Volumizer will list down every mounted volume and give you a quick unmount (eject) option if you hover your mouse over the volume name.

If a physical drive has multiple volumes (partitions), choosing Eject for any of the volumes will unmount all of them immediately. The app will also skip Finder’s eject volume confirmation window. So be a little careful not to accidentally unmount volumes that you still need.

But of course, you can’t unmount the startup disk.

Space Control

It’s amazing how ‘normal’ activities that people do on their computer – downloading movies, managing photos, installing application suites – can fill up the hard drive in no time. If you are one of these ‘normal’ people, you’ll need a Mac utility to constantly monitor the space usage of your hard drive.

Meet SpaceControl. This app will sit in your menu bar and clicking on it will show you the remaining free space on your startup volume. You can also see the sum of these numbers, which is the total free space available on all volumes.

For your convenience, you can set the app to send you a notification email whenever the remaining free space goes below a certain number.

MiniUsage

While Space Control specializes only in hard drive space data, Mini Usage tells you everything that you want to know about your system. The app will show a small menu-bar display of your chosen system performance data: CPU usage (the percentage of your Mac’s processing power that’s currently in use), incoming and outgoing network data rate, and remaining battery juice on your MacBook.

You can also make MiniUsage alternate among all of these statistics every few seconds (1 – 5 seconds) and how often the statistics are updated.

I’m sure that there are other small, useful, but not too well known Mac utilities out there, something like Pauser and BashFlash. If you are familiar with one or more of them, why don’t you share the love with others using the comments below?

If the image was an ISO you could use IMGBurn to burn an ISO file, but what do you do if it’s not? How do you burn the image onto your thumb drive on a friend’s computer without the software it was created with?

Well you can download a little 2.0MB file called ISO Buddy. ISOBuddy will help you burn your images. What it does is convert some of the most popular disk image extensions to be an ISO image. Once you have the image you can burn the ISO file easily.

The file formats that are supported by ISOBuddy are as follows: GI, NRG, CDI, MDF, IMG, B5I, B6I, DMG, PDI, BIN and CCD to ISO image.

After downloading and installing the application you will see a screen that looks like this:

To begin we will attempt to open an image file. I clicked on the Edit menu button and then chose to open an image file:

Go ahead and navigate to your disk image. We do not need to tell it what application created the image. It will show you on the Image Format Is: line. You can see that I used a .GI image from Roxio and ISOBuddy correctly identified it as a Roxio Global Image.

If there are multiple sessions on your CD or DVD we can choose which one we want to select. Most commercial disks will only have one session on them. Next we need to specify where we will be saving our new ISO image to. We do this by clicking on Edit ““> Save as and choosing a path and file name.

Now go ahead and hit the start button and your conversion will start. You can see the progress at the bottom of the interface like so:

When the conversion is complete you should see a message box like this pop up:

Go ahead and hit OK. Now that our conversion was successful we can burn our ISO or simply copy it elsewhere.

Let’s take a look at how to burn the converted ISO using ISOBuddy. Click on the burn button and you will have the option to burn the source image or the output image. You have to burn the target image so choose that one and then you can click on the burn button.

Clicking the burn button will bring up the built in burning utility like so:

Simply select the drive you want to use to burn the disk and hit the start button. You can optionally rescan for new drives if you had not plugged yours in when the initial scan occurred. You can also hit the settings check box to get this menu:

You can click through to the other tabs to see those options as well:

Click start and your image will be on its way to being burnt!

Do you have another free tool that helps to create and burn ISO files? We would love to hear about it in the comments!

Instead of fighting crime, the good guys, those who actually purchase their stuff, have to site through unskippable anti-piracy adds and legal warnings. It’s a bitch slap in the face of the honest consumer.

The same is true for games. People are still pirating them without breaking a sweat, but you have to jump through all kinds of hoops to play your legally purchased copy. It’s quite ridiculous, and immensely disconcerting.

Here’s how you can fight back, smite down those loops, and enjoy your game without having to wrestle copy protection.

Different Kinds Of Copy Protection

In their fight against piracy, game publishers have come up with ever more irritating ways to enforce copy protection. The most common, as you all know, is the disk requirement. Without the ‘original’ CD or DVD inserted, your game will refuse to launch. Even though you don’t really need that disk.

A wave of outrage followed Ubisoft’s latest ‘security’ advancements. Some of their latest releases insist on an internet connection to start the game. Of course, if Ubisoft’s servers are down, or if you simply aren’t connected to the internet at the moment, you won’t be able to play.

Why Honest Consumers Will Want to Know Play Games Without CD

Whatever your opinion on piracy, the facts are simple. Copy protection isn’t hurting them. It takes less than a minute to work around it. It’s the honest consumer that’s affected.

Then, instead of simply recognizing it as a necessary evil, it’s your every right to do something about it. With your legal install, you can install the same no-CD cracks that pirates use, and enjoy your games with less of a hassle. You’re not pirating a game, but getting rid of a very unnecessary evil. This is also 100% legal if you own the game.

Note: as always, the online cracking environment is still riddled with spyware. Use semi-trusted sources, like those mentioned below, to minimalise the risk, and get yourself an anti-spyware program or firewall to get ever safer.

Using Cracks Is Ridiculously Easy

This article mostly focuses on no-CD cracks, i.e. tools that allow you to start your games without inserting the disk, because this kind of copy protection is the most common – and has long been smitten down. Other cracks exist as well, to circumvent different kinds of copy protection. Those can often be obtained and used in the exact same way. Be aware, though, that there are still a number of games that simply haven’t been cracked. In those situations, you’ll have to play by their rules, and jump all the hoops.

Please note that you cannot use a crack without first having the game installed.  So don’t try starting games you haven’t bought and installed first.   It just won’t work.

Installing cracks is often very simple, and always explained in the readme, but there are some common patterns. 95% of all cracks can be installed in one of three ways.

• Gamename.exe & (optionally) *.dll Files

These are original game files, but cracked so they no longer require (e.g.) a disk to launch. They will bear the same names as some of your own game files. Copy them to the game’s folder in Program Files and replace the original. That’s it.

• Crackname.exe

This application (also called a ‘patch’) will crack your game files on the spot. Launch it, guide it to the game’s folder in Program Files and hit crack.

• Filename.reg

These will add strings to your registry when you try to open them. In a nutshell, the registry is a big database where all your computer’s important data is kept. These aren’t as common as back in the day, but still show up once in a while.

Finding a Crack For Your Game

Finding the right crack isn’t very hard. With pirated games, they’re often included in the download. For your legal copy, you’ll have to take a peek in one of the so-called gray zones of the internet. As said before, there is always the possibility of a fake crack, so firewalls can be nifty. Sometimes, though, valid cracks are recognized as spyware, because they try to ‘patch’, or alter your game installation.

Below are some of the best sources for finding game cracks.

• GameCopyWorld

Possibly the single most trustworthy cracking site on the internet. This site tries to focus on legal copying, and offers a wide array of cracks and game trainers. This is the best place to start out.

• GameBurnWorld

Very similar to GameCopyWorld, and not merely in name. Sadly, it’s focusing ever more on trainers, and less on CD cracks. Keep your fingers crossed, though, because this is about the last ‘pretty safe’ crack site you can consult. The other sites offer a lot more cracks, but they’re also a lot more dangerous.

• Cracks(dot)me(dot)uk (NSFW)

Access this site on your own risk! Expect to be met with a considerate number of pop-ups, and sometimes very obscene ads (18+). This is the time to buy yourself a strong and resilient firewall and install an ad-blocker. I would tell you to stay away from this site, apart from the fact that its got absolutely everything. The fake virus cracks, sure, but also pretty much every real crack that’s out there.

Do you have any other tips on how to play games without CD? Let us know in the comments section below!