This article needs to be updated.(August 2018) |
Developer(s) | Disc Soft Ltd. [1] |
---|---|
Stable release | |
Operating system | Windows 98, Windows 2000 and later; OS X 10.6 or later (DT for Mac 2) [6] |
Available in | 38 Languages with additional translation packs [7] |
Type | Virtual drive |
License | Shareware |
Website | www |
Supported file types | |
File Types | Details |
---|---|
b5t | BlindWrite |
b6t | BlindWrite |
bwt | BlindRead |
ccd | CloneCD |
cdi | DiscJuggler |
cue/bin | Cue Sheet |
iso | Standard ISO |
isz | Compressed ISO |
mds/mdf | Media Descriptor File |
mdx | Media Data eXtended |
nrg | Nero Burning ROM disc image |
ape/cue | APE images |
flac | Free Lossless Audio Codec images |
As of August 2014 [8] |
DAEMON Tools is a virtual drive and optical disc authoring program for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS. [9]
DAEMON tools was originally a successor of Generic SafeDisc emulator and incorporated all of its features. [10] The program claims to be able to defeat most copy protection schemes such as SafeDisc and SecuROM. [11] It is currently compatible with Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 10. DAEMON Tools has a special mode for proper operation of copies of discs with advanced protection (SafeDisc, SecuRom and LaserLock, CDCOPS, StarForce and Protect CD), which are used on some discs with games. [12]
Six editions of the product exist: Ultra, Lite, Pro Standard, Pro Advanced, Net and DT for Mac. A feature comparison is given below. [13] Also, the company provides two additional solutions for the data storage organization: DAEMON Tools USB 2 [14] that allows sharing different types of USB devices between remote workstations and DAEMON Tools iSCSI Target 2 [15] – a cross-platform solution that enables creating an iSCSI storage server and provides access to virtual or physical devices, along with VHD images, within home or corporate network.
Feature | Lite 5 | Pro Standard 5 | Pro Advanced 5 | Net 5 | Ultra 2 | for Mac 2 |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
License type | Adware A / Shareware B | Shareware | Shareware | Shareware | Shareware | Shareware |
Maximum number of DT and SCSI virtual devices | 4 | 16 | 32 | 32 | 32 | Unlimited |
Maximum number of IDE virtual devices | 0 | 0 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 0 |
Command-line interface | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
Image compression | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
Image password protection C | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
Image creation D | Extraction only; no preset profiles | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
Burning images | Needs Astroburn | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
Image collection's management | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Image editing | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
Image splitting E | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
Shell extensions | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
Virtual device property monitoring | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
Volume Mount Points F | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
Burning RMPS data on discs | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
Image conversion D | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
Mounting virtual hard disks (VHD) | No | No | No | No | Yes | Yes |
Installation over the network | No | No | No | Yes | No | No |
Image Catalog sharing | No | No | No | Yes | No | No |
iSCSI Server | No | No | No | Up to 16 targets | No | No |
iSCSI Initiator | No | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Mounting images on remote computers | No | No | No | Yes | Yes | No |
Sharing disc drives on the network | No | No | No | Yes | No | No |
Bootable USB creation | No | No | No | No | Yes | No |
RAM Disk creation | No | No | No | No | Yes | No |
TrueCrypt image creation | No | No | No | No | Yes | No |
Mounting ZIP files | No | No | No | No | Yes | No |
.mds
and .mdx
images..iso
, .mds/.mdf
and .mdx
The default file format of DAEMON Tools is Media Data eXtended (MDX). MDX is a disc image file format similar to MDS/MDF images. It supports all of MDS/MDF format features except that all data is in one monolithic file only. The files of these types bear the filename extension of .mdx. [21]
MDX file contains metadata of original media – specifically the main physical parameters of disc, such as layer breaks, sessions, tracks and other. It could be described as being an archive file containing all data from a CD/DVD. It also supports data compression. MDX file includes the magic number "MEDIA DESCRIPTOR" at the beginning of the file.
On 13 February 2012, one of DAEMON Tools' components known as MountSpace became a subject of privacy concerns. MountSpace, a service-oriented component gathers and sends information about disc images used in DAEMON Tools to mountspace.com along with users' IP addresses. Although MountSpace can be disabled during installation, it is criticized for transmitting information despite being disabled and lacking a privacy policy. [22] [23] [24] [25] The initial discovery of the concerning issue is attributed to Rafael Rivera of Within Windows blog. [22] [24] [25]
Developer(s) | sYk0 |
---|---|
Stable release | 1.6.9040 / 4 February 2009 |
Operating system | Microsoft Windows |
Available in | English |
License | Freeware |
Website | forum |
YASU (Yet Another SecuROM Utility) is a very small tool that works as a SCSI-drive protector. It was created by sYk0 and can be used to hide emulated drives from SecuROM 7 and SafeDisc 4. YASU is a companion program for Daemon Tools and currently being hosted, supported and maintained by the Daemon Tools team. On March 4 of 2009, sYk0 announced development of Omen which is to succeed development of YASU. [26] As of January 2010, development of Omen has been abandoned. [27]
In computing, an optical disc drive is a disc drive that uses laser light or electromagnetic waves within or near the visible light spectrum as part of the process of reading or writing data to or from optical discs. Some drives can only read from certain discs, but recent drives can both read and record, also called burners or writers. Compact discs, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs are common types of optical media which can be read and recorded by such drives.
A live CD is a complete bootable computer installation including operating system which runs directly from a CD-ROM or similar storage device into a computer's memory, rather than loading from a hard disk drive. A live CD allows users to run an operating system for any purpose without installing it or making any changes to the computer's configuration. Live CDs can run on a computer without secondary storage, such as a hard disk drive, or with a corrupted hard disk drive or file system, allowing data recovery.
An optical disc image is a disk image that contains everything that would be written to an optical disc, disk sector by disc sector, including the optical disc file system. ISO images contain the binary image of an optical media file system, including the data in its files in binary format, copied exactly as they were stored on the disc. The data inside the ISO image will be structured according to the file system that was used on the optical disc from which it was created.
Alcohol 120% is a disk image emulator and disc burning software for Microsoft Windows developed by Alcohol Soft. An edition named Alcohol 52% is also offered which lacks the burning engine. The software can create image files from a source CD/DVD/Blu-ray, as well as mount them in virtual drives, all in the proprietary Media Descriptor File format; images in this format consist of a pair of .mds
and .mdf
files.
A disk enclosure is a specialized casing designed to hold and power hard disk drives or solid state drives while providing a mechanism to allow them to communicate to one or more separate computers.
SafeDisc is a copy protection program for Microsoft Windows applications and games distributed on optical disc. Created by Macrovision Corporation, it was aimed to hinder unauthorized disc duplication. The program was first introduced in 1998 and was discontinued on March 31, 2009.
SecuROM is a CD/DVD copy protection and digital rights management (DRM) system developed by Sony DADC and introduced in 1998. It aims to prevent unauthorised copying and reverse engineering of software, primarily commercial computer games running on Windows. The method of disc protection in later versions is data position measurement, which may be used in conjunction with online activation DRM. SecuROM gained prominence in the late 2000s but generated controversy because of its requirement for frequent online authentication and strict key activation limits. A 2008 class-action lawsuit was filed against Electronic Arts for its use of SecuROM in the video game Spore. Opponents, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, believe that fair-use rights are restricted by DRM applications such as SecuROM.
A cue sheet, or cue file, is a metadata file which describes how the tracks of a CD or DVD are laid out. Cue sheets are stored as plain text files and commonly have a .cue filename extension. CDRWIN first introduced cue sheets, which are now supported by many optical disc authoring applications and media players.
A CloneCD Control File is a text descriptor with the extension .ccd used by CloneCD to store the subcode data of a CD/DVD image. These files need to be combined with an image file to be burned. It may also come with a subchannel file.
ImgBurn is an optical disc authoring program that allows the recording of many types of CD, DVD and Blu-ray images to recordable media. Starting with version 2.0.0.0, ImgBurn can also burn files and data directly to CD or DVD. It is written in C++. It supports padding DVD-Video files so the layer break occurs on a proper cell boundary.
AVCHD is a file-based format for the digital recording and playback of high-definition video. It is H.264 and Dolby AC-3 packaged into the MPEG transport stream, with a set of constraints designed around the camcorders.
CDemu is a free and open-source virtual drive software, designed to emulate an optical drive and optical disc on the Linux operating system.
Target Disk Mode is a boot mode unique to Macintosh computers.
An NRG file is a proprietary optical disc image file format originally created by Nero AG for the Nero Burning ROM utility. It is used to store disc images. Other than Nero Burning ROM, however, a variety of software titles can use these image files. For example, Alcohol 120%, or Daemon Tools can mount NRG files onto virtual drives for reading.
The Linux booting process involves multiple stages and is in many ways similar to the BSD and other Unix-style boot processes, from which it derives. Although the Linux booting process depends very much on the computer architecture, those architectures share similar stages and software components, including system startup, bootloader execution, loading and startup of a Linux kernel image, and execution of various startup scripts and daemons. Those are grouped into 4 steps: system startup, bootloader stage, kernel stage, and init process. When a Linux system is powered up or reset, its processor will execute a specific firmware/program for system initialization, such as Power-on self-test, invoking the reset vector to start a program at a known address in flash/ROM, then load the bootloader into RAM for later execution. In personal computer (PC), not only limited to Linux-distro PC, this firmware/program is called BIOS, which is stored in the mainboard. In embedded Linux system, this firmware/program is called boot ROM. After being loaded into RAM, bootloader will execute to load the second-stage bootloader. The second-stage bootloader will load the kernel image into memory, decompress and initialize it then pass control to this kernel image. Second-stage bootloader also performs several operation on the system such as system hardware check, mounting the root device, loading the necessary kernel modules, etc. Finally, the first user-space process starts, and other high-level system initializations are performed.
Media Descriptor File (MDF) is a proprietary disc image file format developed for Alcohol 120%, an optical disc authoring program. Daemon Tools, CDemu, MagicISO, PowerDVD, and WinCDEmu can also read the MDF format. A disc image is a computer file replica of the computer files and file system of an optical disc.
MagicISO is a CD/DVD image shareware utility that can extract, edit, create, and burn disc image files. It offers the possibility of converting between ISO and CUE/BIN and their proprietary Universal Image Format disc image format.
Notable software applications that can access or manipulate disk image files are as follows, comparing their disk image handling features.
AcetoneISO is a free and open-source virtual drive software to mount and manage image files. Its goals are to be simple, intuitive and stable. Written in Qt, this software is meant for all those people looking for a "Daemon Tools for Linux". However, AcetoneISO does not emulate any copy protection while mounting.
The Advanced Disc Filing System (ADFS) is a computing file system unique to the Acorn computer range and RISC OS-based successors. Initially based on the rare Acorn Winchester Filing System, it was renamed to the Advanced Disc Filing System when support for floppy discs was added and on later 32-bit systems a variant of a PC-style floppy controller.
DAEMON Tools Lite is free for home and non-business use. In case you want to use DAEMON Tools in any organization, you need to buy a license.
[Inside third screenshot] Support is provided only for Paid License users.
Due to some changes in marketing strategy Korea is no longer among the countries for which a Free version of DAEMON Tools Lite available.
mdx / mds (Media Data eXtended / Media Descriptor Files) — these formats are developed by DAEMON Tools developers.