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I was searching the web for a solution to my problem and came across you’re post at toms hardware. I was going to post my reply at toms but they wanted to spam me so I thought I’d go right to the source and post here.
hmmm….that iodd system could solve my problem I think but it’s in the UK and I’m a cheapskate. What I have is an Ibm thinkpad (x41) and if you look up the specs it doesn’t come with a burner or even a drive bay. I think there are quite a few smaller systems and devices that don’t have a burner attached.
Personally. I need a way to copy stuff to a local hard drive or flash drive or whatever(SD maybe) and have it act as a burner would and be identified by other programs as a burner.
In my case True crypt insists on using windows burner (on Win7) before it will encrypt my whole hard drive, and windows burner doesn’t recognize virtual drives created by daemon tools or other virtual drive programs.I read somewhere that daemon tools has no intention of expanding into this niche either.
It seems to me that software is easier to make then hardware.
Why can’t there be some software that allows flash drives or whatever to be mounted as a burner and be recognized by other programs. I’ve been looking and it’s not out there yet. You have to write the software/firmware first anyway before you create the hardware right? Also, it’d have some future proofing if it’s in software. Currently making a bootable flash drive from an iso image is a real pain. I think such a product could really take off.
I would be proud to pirate such a product(cheapskate remember 😉 and of course recommend such a product to others to buy 😉 Fortunately I’m immune to seeing myself as a total sponge since people actually do listen to my recommendations when they’re looking for cost effective technology solutions.
As a unix admin I’d be happy to do some software beta testing as well.
P.S. You mentioned production costs earlier. Software is also cheaper then hardware and you can build up a following for your product first at very low costs. Then convert to hardware when you want to speed it up and/or protect from piracy. Or better maybe have some company build it into a chip that’s included in motherboards already. Anyways just kicking around ideas. later
aslaskdjf: I’ve seen the iODD system before and it appears to be identical to what I’ve been developing, with the exception of using a laptop drive instead of a microSD card (actually I had planned to do a laptop drive version as well, but we’ll see). As far as I can tell it does not also allow burning, but I could be wrong.
My device cannot be done in software as it is intended to be a virtual optical drive that you can boot from. Also my device does not strictly require any software to function, but I will provide software to make configuration simple (the alternative being directly editing the config file on the microSD card). For non-bootable virtual optical drives there’s plenty of software available, most notably DAEMON Tools. I would like to get isostick to also show up as a burner, and that may be a firmware update down the road.
As for a virtual burner without any hardware, it should be possible but I’m no expert. I would imagine that, since a physical burner communicates with the OS via drivers, one could write a driver that would say “oh yeah there’s totally a burner hooked up,” in much the same way DAEMON Tools tells the OS there’s a read-only drive attached. Another example would be PDF “printers,” which are drivers + software that display themselves as a printer which actually output to a PDF file.
Will I develop such a virtual burner as a software-only product? Not a chance, sorry. I’m not experienced in writing drivers or Windows or MacOS X, and have only cursory understanding of Linux device drivers. I wish you luck in finding such a thing, though! Maybe if/when I update isostick to show up as a burner you’ll be willing to part ways with some of your money. 😉