How to Mount ISO Images using Alcohol 120%

Alcohol 120% is a really cool software that will let you create virtual CD/DVD ROM drives.  With a virtual drive, you won’t have to load the physical media, so you can preserve those expensive games CDs or DVDs on your hard drive.  It is also very useful for mounting ISO files so you dont’ have to burn them to physical media.
So how do we create a virtual CD/DVD ROM drive?  In Alcohol you can set multiple virtual drives using its easy to use GUI.  First open the Alcohol 120% application and then click Virtual Drive under the Options group:

The options window will open with the Virtual Drive parameter fields. Set the number of virtual drives to 1 if you want to make only 1 virtual drive (or more if you want).  Check the Remount images upon system reboot if you want the drive to remain loaded after restarting Windows.   

Set the drive letter of the virtual drive using the Drive letter field.  By default it will use the next available drive letter it could find from your computer.  Click OK to activate the drive.

In the example above it used the drive “F” as the drive letter.  You can confirm the drive by exploring it on Windows Explorer:

If you click the drive you will see a message like below:

This means the disk has no media inside it.  Since this is a virtual drive, we need to point this to a CD or DVD image (like an ISO or any disk image file).  To load an ISO file, right click the drive using the Alcohol window and then choose Mount Image:

Locate the ISO file using the Open dialog box:

Then you should be able to see the image loaded on the virtual drive:

After this you can use the virtual drive like an ordinary CD/DVD ROM drive.  Browse the drive to see the content of the ISO image:

You may use the same steps above for any of the image file formats shown below:

If you want to change the image file loaded, use the steps above to point to other image files.
Overall, I am very happy with how Alcohol 120% handled my image files.  With this tool I don’t have to waste blank CDs or DVDs just to be able to use the image files. You can also read my previous post on how to mount ISO images using Virtual CD-ROM from Microsoft.