Freeware: Phantom CD & Microsoft Virtual CD-ROM

Writable optical discs like CD-R/RW, DVD+-R/RW and Blu-ray BD-RE have a life span of two to five years. They have a recording surface consisting of a layer of dye that can be modified by heat. The degradation process can result in the data "shifting" on the surface and thus becoming unreadable to the laser beam.

To avoid burning your discs every few years, copy the CD, DVD or Blu-ray discs to ISO or BIN/CUE disc images to your hard drive.

Hard drives have their limitations too. However, it is much easier and faster to copy dozens or even hundreds of disc image files to a new hard drive than to burn dozens of new CD's or DVD's. 

These two CD emulating software solutions are what I use on Windows machines:

1. Phantom CD
   Download it from the developer's site:
   http://www.phantombility.com/en/prod/phantomcd/download/
2. Microsoft's Virtual CDROM software can’t be found via a regular search on Microsoft Downloads. This is a free program (Unsupported by Microsoft PSS) for Windows XP, 2000 and 2003 that lets you create a virtual CD drive on your hard disk. Supported file formats are: .udf; .cdfs; .jo; .iso; .rock. It weighs only 60KB in size.

MS Virtual CD software Installation instructions (copied from the included Readme)

• Copy VCdRom.sys to your %systemroot%\system32\drivers folder.
• Execute VCdControlTool.exe
• Click “Driver control”
• If the “Install Driver” button is available, click it. Navigate to the %systemroot%\system32\drivers folder, select VCdRom.sys, and click Open.
• Click “Start”
• Click OK
• Click “Add Drive” to add a drive to the drive list. Ensure that the drive added is not a local drive. If it is, continue to click “Add Drive” until an unused drive letter is available.
• Select an unused drive letter from the drive list and click “Mount”.
• Navigate to the image file, select it, and click “OK”. UNC naming conventions should not be used, however mapped network drives should be OK.

Direct Download link:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/b/6/7b6abd84-7841-4978-96f5-bd58df02efa2/winxpvirtualcdcontrolpanel_21.exe