Surely you have had a situation when you want to copy a game or a movie, but this becomes impossible due to the fact that protection is installed on the disk. There is a way out of this situation, you can create a disk image, its exact copy, which will be played on a virtual disk drive.
There is a phrase "virtual disk", it is not entirely correct. Making a copy of a disc requires two elements.
The first item is the disk image file. It contains a copy of the file system, structure and data content that are on the original media (CD, DVD, HD-DVD, Blu-ray). This file duplicates a set of sectors of the original media. There are several types of disk image files, depending on the program in which they are made and for which they are created: *. ISO - the most common image file extension; *. IMG, *. DMG; *. VCD (VirtualCD); *. NRG (Nero Burning ROM); *. MDS / *. MDF (DAEMON Tools, Alcohol 120%); *. PQI (DriveImage); *. DAA (PowerISO); *. VDF (FreeVDF, VDFCrypt); *. CCD / *. IMG / *. SUB (CloneCD).
The second element is the virtual floppy drive. In this case, "virtual" means that there is no purely physical drive, but there is a program that emulates its operation in the operating system environment.
To be correct, the concept of "virtual disk" is applicable to working with virtual machines, that is, with programs that emulate the technical parameters of a computer and allow you to install programs and operating systems. A virtual disk in this case is a file that is defined in a virtual machine as a physical disk used to store information. It can be either a hard disk image or an optical disk or floppy disk image.
Disk images are used to distribute large software packages such as GNU / Linux and to install software on similarly configured computers. These files are indispensable for storing, transferring and using data without optical media. Images are used to archive data on hard drives and, as a result, can be opened and run using archiving programs.
