Gizmo Drive virtualizes all sorts of drives

[Thrax]

Gizmo Drive virtualizes all sorts of drives (http://icrontic.com/downloads/gizmo-drive-virtualizes-all-sorts-of-drives)

[MiracleManS]

I, for one, welcome the ability to create a virtual beast from the Jurassic Period onto my personal computer.

[Leonardo]

Would someone please put this in plain language. I know what a virtual machine is after having played with Linux in a VM within Windows. Now, what is a virtual drive? How does one use it? What are the advantages, disadvantages?

[Buddy J]

A virtual drive is just what its name implies. It makes an imaginary drive of some type using your hard drive or system RAM as a storage medium. One of the benefits is being able to mount .iso files without burning them to a physical CD or DVD. The down side is the drive doesn't exist and usually is destroyed when you power off the system.

[kryyst]

What it allows you to do is mount all various formats of virtual images and read them. So say you made a virtual machine in VMware. Normally to see that drive you'd have to load that machine up and browse it like a real computer. What this does is, it allows you to browse the virtual harddrive without starting the machine. If you are familiar with Ghost at all and it's Ghost Viewer that allowed you to open up a ghost image and view the drive contents. This does the same thing only many, many file types.

Major kudo's for this program.

[Leonardo]

Alright, I understand. OK, Ghost and Acronis have a similar feature where you can look into backups/images and even write to them. I can definitely see the utility of going directly to a virtual second OS without having to boot it up in virtual machine. What is something else that someone could use it for? Apart from those three things I just mentioned, I feel like this a "So what?" thing, simply because I lack experience.

[MiracleManS]

I think its the fact that it supports just about every sort of image support you could imagine. Everything ever...even aquatic reptiles from 65+ million years ago

[Snarkasm]

I use similar tools to run CDs and DVDs from hard drive. Depending on your hardware, it can be much faster to install something like Office or Win7 from an image on your hard drive mounted to a virtual optical drive than it is trying to spin up your old DVD-ROM - and it's almost certainly a lot more quiet.

Beyond that, virtualization in general is just highly diverse - there's tons of things you can do with them if you just don't want to screw with your real data and hardware.

[Leonardo]

from 65+ million years ago Ohh, OK, like DOS. I get it.

[kryyst]

It's more a system tool for admins. Normal users could use it instead of daemon tools but most wouldn't do more then that with it. If you were paranoid you can use it to create encrypted portable virtual file systems which is pretty cool. Other then that it's another useful tool for system recovery from backups.