I have a two year old daughter who knows how to manipulate my laptop.  She knows how to eject the optical disc and remove it.  I cannot punish my daughter especially when she took the disc and scratch in on the floor.  What I did was installed a virtual driver on my laptop. 

Did you experience installing a program like game in your pc and take away the disc from your optical drive?  When you start to open the program it won’t work because it looks for the disc drive?  And it keeps on asking you to insert the disc on your optical drive.  Well, no need to worry because you can now install virtual driver to prevent this problem.  But what is a virtual driver?

Virtual driver is also called optical media emulation software. It is not a real CD/DVD driver that you can visually see on your PC or laptop, but your computer perceives it as an optical driver for your CD/DVD. This software is commonly used to run CD or DVD image files such as ISO, BIN, DDA, and UIF.

I commonly used this software to run any installed games/learning software without inserting the respective CD or DVD on my optical drive.  All I have to do is to mount the CD or DVD contents on my virtual driver.  I observed that it operates faster that running a program from the real disc.

But how will you install a virtual driver in your PC?  You will need optical media emulation software.  Mostly, I used DAEMON TOOL.  It is free software with no error, and it is very easy to install and use.   You can download this software on the internet.

Here are the steps on how to install optical media emulation software.  Remember, you need to have an internet connection to download the installer.

First, download the DAEMON TOOL.  You can go  at this site http://www.daemon-tools.cc/dtcc/download.php.  Download the DAEMON Tools Lite.

Second, install the downloaded file.  After the step by step installation you need to restart your computer.  As you computer resumes, it will update virtual devices on your PC.  You will notice progress report on your taskbar like found new hardware.  This is the emulation software or the virtual driver.  You will see the DAEMON icon once it is done updating the drives.

Third, test the installed DAEMON TOOL on your PC.  Install the CD/DVD that you want to mount on your optical drive.  On your taskbar, you will notice DAEMON TOOL ICON.  Right click on the icon, and select, "virtual device", then "device 0: ... ", and “mount image".  Browse your file and select the image file that you want to run.

Take note that DAEMON tool does not support all image files.  I only use this software to run ISO files, for DAA and UIF files I used other software to mount these images. 

Since virtual driver operates faster than real disc, a lot of computer user used this emulation software to run a game, interactive CD and even movies. 

You can download your desired optical media emulation software from their websites.