Virtual Drive
Hard Drive Recovery - Virtual Drive
A virtual drive is a drive that presents as a physical drive to a guest operating system. It will have disk images substituted for disk reading hardware through the use of a disk emulator.
Depending on the situations, a virtual drive may emulate any type of physical drive such as hard drive, floppy drive, CD/DVD or a network. Emulated drives typically reside on RAM for fast read/write access. They are known as RAM disk. They may also reside on a hard drive.
Virtual drives find the best application in the mounting of disk images of CDs and DVDs. Since these disk images are not modifiable by the drive, these virtual drives are typically read only. However, some software provides virtual CD/DVD drives, which can produce new disk images; these types of drives are known by different names, including ‘virtual burner.’
Virtual hard disks are commonly used in ‘on the fly disk encryption’ (OTFE) software such as FreeOTFE and TrueCrypt, where an encrypted ‘image’ of a disk is stored on the PC. When the user enters the password, the disk image is mounted and is made available as a new drive letter on the PC. Files that are written to this virtual drive are actually written to the encrypted image, and not stored in cleartext format.
Different operating systems use different methods to add virtual drive functionality to them. Microsoft Windows require additional software to install this feature whereas Linux and Mac OS X have virtual drive functionality built in to them.
