As per title if anyone has a working link for it.... Should be called MUI_Win2000_D2.iso Thanks in advance
Oh, I read that as "Sadly I am not old enough to know what a MDF is". But I guess you know where it is still being used then.
No prob, images are alredy downloaded, converted and installed in a VM, everything works as expected.
Unfortunately, there were many different and competing optical container formats, exactly like the abundance of formats existing for images and video containers. ISO (prob. named after the ISO9660 filesystem) is actually only the simplest of them and severely limited. We normally used CUE/BIN (CDRWIN) for Audio, CCD/BIN/SUB (CloneCD) or MDS/MDF (Alcohol 120%) for games, then there were also PDI (Padus), BWT (Blindwrite) etc. etc. These days, ISO is usually preferred, unless you hit one of its limits. Multi-track or multi-session use CUE/BIN or the MDS/MDF format. Sorry for the rant, but finding a program supporting all these was very difficult, even more today. Personally, I'm mostly using ImgBurn, Alcohol 120% and UltraISO, covering most of them.
In two words, most of non ISO formats existed because they were able to to defeat some copy protection technologies.
The advanced formats were introduced because of the limits of the original one. My first discs were using High Sierra or ISO9660 filesystems. One track/session was the norm and ISO sufficient. Then, the shenanigans started: - Subchannel data, which could only be read in RAW mode (there were two, RAW16 and RAW96). - Mode 1 Form 2 and Mode 2 discs, - Multi-track (apart from Redbook Audio, which was available from the start), - Multi-session, - MAC forks, - Gapless Audio (Live discs) which needed DAO (Disc-At-Once) reading instead of the usual TAO (Track-At-Once) one, - CD Text, - Intentional bad sectors or weak sectors, - variable sector lengths, - special disc and sector layouts requiring DPM (Data Position Management), - intentionally corrupted TOC (Table Of Contents), - barcodes, - Packet writing, - etc. etc. While some of these features were specially invented for copy protection, the majority of them was in the original rainbow books. Copy protection has used them in creative ways, that's where the confusion often comes from. Today, it's lot cleaner, we have the UDF filesystem and mostly single track, single session CDs/DVDs. That's why ISO is still popular, but there's still the occasional odd disc I need to use Alcohol 120% for (yes, I'm licensed). Edit: I'm stopping now before it turns into a big OT clusterf**k. Thank you.
The first non audio CDrom I touched was a video CD (actually 2 CDs) Star trek the Wrath of Kahn, the second one was Tomb Raider 1 in '96 and it was already half data and half PCM audio, but nero managed it w/o any problem. Personally I used Alchool a couple of time and just to mount a regular ISO.
I started three years earlier, with a 2x CD-ROM drive. Magazine CD-ROMs were the hype, then. Of course, that was long before I got my first burner (SCSI, 4x).
Just use ImDiskTk-x64.exe / ImDiskTk-x86.exe, is a tiny ramdisk utility, that among very useful other things: mount iso, vmdk, vhd, vhdx (even under XP/Vista/7), create ramdisks to speedup browsers/other programs and avoid SSD wearing, can also save entire disks in images or CD/DVD/BD in ISOs. Most of the features are available as context menus. Such monster installation is 560KB on x64 flavour. As usual good wine comes on small barrels
This is so true!! I will try out the applications that you both suggested! Thank you! In the mean while I found the one that I was remembering from my memory. Thank you Carlos!! It was indeed the ISO Recorder by Alex Feinman. The website doesn't exist anymore as you say but I found working links on the web archive.