Netbook Bios Idea for ISO Files
So I was thinking the other day after I found this article over at Lifehacker about WinCDEmu that can auto-mount .iso, .img, etc. files into virtual drives in Windows. I know physical media is slowly dying out and it probably won’t be too long until we don’t have those formats any more. But wouldn’t it be cool if your netbook had an option in the bios to have a virtual CD/DVD drive? You could have a simple option in the BIOS to turn it on and then just point the BIOS to the .iso/.img file and boot off it like you would with any normal CD/DVD. I guess the option could exist to copy the file to a USB drive first (in case you are going to be formatting your hard drive). But overall it would just let you mount a file as a virtual drive in the BIOS level. This way it wouldn’t matter what OS you are running because even when you are booted to the OS the BIOS would be able to tell your OS that you have a new virtual CD/DVD drive and your OS wouldn’t know the difference.
I think this is something similar to what the MacBook Air has with its drive sharing, but that needs network and another computer that has the drive to share. I don’t know why that couldn’t be applied just to a file that exists on a USB drive or something. Although OSX already automounts .iso files inside the OS, and I applaud them for this, you shouldn’t have to have a OS running to carry out this basic task.
I just thought I would throw this out there because in my head it makes a lot of sense, especially with machines getting smaller and smaller, I think CD/DVD drives will soon be obsolete (especially on notebooks).
If this is already possible on computers, and I am just crazy, please let me know in the comments.
Excellent idea. It would sure beat purchasing an external optical drive for 1 time use, or tearing out an internal drive to use with an adapter like this:
http://www.bunkerhollow.com/blogs/matt/archive/2009/02/28/asus-eee-pc-1000he-review.aspx
I think that this is a great idea, I am about to finally kick dusty old XP and install windows 7, as MSDN subscriber I can download ISO of instalation disk. And I must burn it to CD and then install. And I got a same idea as you do, and do some googling to see is there such BIOS that can mount ISO images, sadly your blog post was only thing I found.
I will wrote a quick e-mail to some BIOS manufacturers.
If you have a large enough USB drive (~4GB) you can always install Vista and Windows 7 using that. And for Linux you can use unetbootin to do the same thing.