A small program that lives in the notification area and does one thing: it turns a finished disc image into a drive letter, and it can keep eighteen of them open at once. No disc goes into a tray. Because there is no main window, the right button on the tray icon is the entire interface, and getting used to that takes about a minute.

One job, done in one place

DVDFab Virtual Drive treats a disc image that already exists as if it were a drive belonging to the machine. Once mounted, the files inside appear in the file manager exactly as they would from a pressed disc, so a player, an installer or a backup tool sees a disc and nothing else. The program has no main window; it sits in the notification area, and the context menu on its icon is the real entry point.

Mounting is read only. Whatever sits inside the image is what you see, and the virtual drive never writes back into it. Changing the contents means going back to the step where the image was made.

Setting the count of drives

Right click the tray icon and the first item sets how many drives exist, anywhere from zero to eighteen; a few ticks and a few more letters appear. That ceiling is shared across DVD, Blu-ray and Ultra HD, and the product page words it as up to 18 virtual DVD, Blu-ray, and Ultra HD drives. It is not eighteen of each.

Letters and icons can be changed too. During installation the context menu icon can be attached to the system, and later adjustments happen in the settings. When there are many images and the letters get confusing, holding the count down to what is actually needed stays tidier than opening the full eighteen.

Which images it recognises

The official list runs to eight extensions: ISO, BIN, CCD, DVD, IMG, MINISO, NRG and UDF. The common whole-disc ISO and the split BIN plus CCD pair both belong there, and an NRG left behind by older tools mounts just as well.

There are two ways to mount. Either right click the image file, choose mount and pick a drive, or right click the tray icon and choose from the menu of each drive. An image mounted once joins a recent list, so mounting it again next time takes one press instead of a walk through folders.

Who picks it up afterwards

What the virtual drive produces is a standard drive letter, and any program that reads optical discs will list it among its sources. Unmount and the letter disappears, leaving the other programs as clean as they were. With several drives open at once, giving each a letter you will remember is worth the trouble, if only to avoid mounting into the wrong one.

Windows has mounted ISO files from the context menu since version 8, which is convenient, but it recognises ISO alone and does nothing with the Blu-ray folder layout. This tool fills exactly those two gaps: a few more formats, and Blu-ray folders that become a mountable disc by way of a .miniso file.

The switches in the tray

The settings are few and practical: start with the system, mount the previous image on launch, and unmount every drive on exit. The interface ships in twenty-two languages, so no separate language pack is needed after installation.

What a .miniso is for

This is the vendor's own image format, and it stores only the header information of a disc, which usually comes to one or two megabytes. It exists for Blu-ray films already sitting on a hard drive as a folder: instead of wrapping tens of gigabytes into a full ISO, generate a .miniso, mount it, and the player reads it as a whole Blu-ray disc.

The entry sits in the tray menu as well, under Make .miniso Image, and it only asks for the folder holding the film.

A name that took a detour

The tool has changed its name twice. On 30 September 2021 the vendor released 3.0.0.0, and the changelog described it as the first version of ExplorerFab, a new tool that replaced the older virtual drive and added burning, ISO extraction from a disc and image building from a folder.

That branch stopped at 3.0.1.9 on 8 June 2023. The product page now carries the virtual drive name again, says once known as ExplorerFab, files ExplorerFab as a former name, and talks about mounting and nothing else.

The current version and what it needs

The download centre offers version 2.0.0.5, as a 6.1 MB online installer or a 46.5 MB offline one, in both x64 and x86 builds. The stated requirements name Windows 11, 10, 8.1, 8 and 7, while another place on the product page lists only the 64-bit builds of Windows 11 and 10. The two statements do not quite agree, so check your own system before installing on an older machine.

The product itself is free, and the price in the page's structured data reads zero.

What it does not do

A virtual drive only turns an image into a disc. Playback and decoding belong to the player. Whether a mounted Blu-ray image plays depends on whether the player understands that structure; the player built into the system usually handles DVD structure only, and Blu-ray needs another tool.

It will not build an image for you either. With nothing but a physical disc in hand, another program has to turn that disc into an ISO or a folder first, and that step sits outside this tool.

If the goal is simply to make a double click on an image behave like a disc, eighteen drives, eight formats and twenty-two languages cover most situations. Burning and ISO extraction belong to the archived ExplorerFab branch, and this branch mounts discs and stops there.