I recently had the need to burn several duplicates of a CD I made, and I’ve always used Nero Burning Rom for that in the past.

This time, however, I’d upgraded to Vista, and my copy of Nero (a version that came in the box with a DVD drive I bought some time ago) wouldn’t run any longer.

Strike 1

I fire up VMWare, thinking I could install it to a VM. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like VMWare supports the virtualization of a DVD RW or CD RW drive yet.

Strike 2

So I start rummaging around the net for something.

What I found was a mountain of programs to do the job, but they all seemed lacking in one respect or another. Worse, they generally sell for 20-50$, which isn’t bad, but considering this is Vista, I’d have thought a decent CD/DVD package would have been in the box.

Eventually, I came across BurnAtOnce, www.burnatonce.net, a freeware front-end to the open source cdrdao and cdrtools programs (which are linux-bred command line apps, and not the friendliest things in the world to work with).

It’s a bit old, and from what I could gather, it’s not being actively developed anymore, but… it’s small, simple, free, and best of all, it seems to work great for grabbing images of a disk, no matter what the format, burning from the images, and in general, doing disk dupe and backup operations.

Good stuff.

I also found an app called DeepBurner. They do have a PRO version for 25$, but the freeware version (and better, the portable freeware version), seems to do everything with ISO files I’d need to do. Great for data only cd’s. And that portable version is just copy and go. No install necessary.