Creating Acer Recovery DVD to ISO - No Optical Drive [closed]

Question

Possible Duplicate:
Virtual CDR driver

I have an acer travelmate laptop that i'm trying to create the recovery dvd(s) for. I am stuck at this screen:

This machine doesn't have an optical drive. Sure, I could connect an external one - but ideally I want to store these 3 DVDs as ISO files on my network (as not to create clutter)

Is there a way of mapping a "virtual" optical drive, to save the written to contents as ISO?

Answer 1

This Wikipedia article lists several programs, but unfortunately doesn't provide links.

Software with virtual burner capabilities include Virtual CD, Phantom Burner and Original CD Emulator which allows CD-R, DVD-R and DVD-RW emulation, and Noteburner which is designed for automatically creating MP3 files based on an Audio CD being created by music software such as iTunes.

It does also state:

A virtual CD burner can be used by any CD burning/writing software, and create an image which can be later mounted as a virtual drive. Most CD writing software does not provide CD burner capability, instead providing a manual option within the program such as "Create Disc Image" or "New ISO File".

Which I'd forgotten, so check your current CD/DVD burning tool to see if it has this option.

Answer 2

Looking far into the future, there is also the problem that if you manage to create those restore CD ISO's now, without an optical drive, how can you actually make use of them when you need them?

I had this problem when I came to do a restore on a laptop with neither floppy nor optical drive and which wouldn't boot from my USB optical drive.

In the end, I used this howto to boot over my network. It uses a pxe network bootloader to boot into a network capable boot floppy which then allows you to access the recovery DVD as a network drive.

This works from a completely blank disk - uselful if you've had to replace your laptop hard drive due to failure.

Answer 3

Try DeamonTools.

This will emulate virtual drives.