Hi,
Can anyone tell me how, at the OS level, a CD is seen as a CD and not a harddrive? This is not for pirating or any such subversive purpose--I just simply copy my install CD's to the HD, which greatly speeds things up when I do major hardware changes and have to reinstall Windows & my apps--or more specifically--when I obey the most common Tech Support 'Fix' of all: "Reinstall it".
But sometimes the install software 'knows' that it's not reading from a physical CD. I see this mostly with my kids' games--I do the same 'copy to hd' thing for them because I'd faint if they could actually keep track of them or not get sticky fingerprints all over them.
Anyway, I have Paragon's CD emulator, and it works very well for most cd's, but some still persist with the 'please put the CD in the drive and hit Retry', or something like that. I guess the question boils down to:
Could it be--in these cases where an Emulator doesn't even work--that either the software is so primative that it 'assumes' D: is the CD drive? Or that it's so advanced that it can detect an emulator? What is the 'signature' of a CD? A registry entry in the Control Set? I thought maybe it was some 'raw data' in a non-standard format, but logically if a software program on a PC can read the data from a CD, then it can read it from a harddrive, too, unless the actual CD drive itself is proprietary (ie, playstation, et al).
Can anyone shine some light on this? Thanks,
--jsteph
Can anyone tell me how, at the OS level, a CD is seen as a CD and not a harddrive? This is not for pirating or any such subversive purpose--I just simply copy my install CD's to the HD, which greatly speeds things up when I do major hardware changes and have to reinstall Windows & my apps--or more specifically--when I obey the most common Tech Support 'Fix' of all: "Reinstall it".
But sometimes the install software 'knows' that it's not reading from a physical CD. I see this mostly with my kids' games--I do the same 'copy to hd' thing for them because I'd faint if they could actually keep track of them or not get sticky fingerprints all over them.
Anyway, I have Paragon's CD emulator, and it works very well for most cd's, but some still persist with the 'please put the CD in the drive and hit Retry', or something like that. I guess the question boils down to:
Could it be--in these cases where an Emulator doesn't even work--that either the software is so primative that it 'assumes' D: is the CD drive? Or that it's so advanced that it can detect an emulator? What is the 'signature' of a CD? A registry entry in the Control Set? I thought maybe it was some 'raw data' in a non-standard format, but logically if a software program on a PC can read the data from a CD, then it can read it from a harddrive, too, unless the actual CD drive itself is proprietary (ie, playstation, et al).
Can anyone shine some light on this? Thanks,
--jsteph