Like many others I don't like, in fact resent, having to keep a CD I have purchased in the drive. If no-CD cracks are verboten, then how does one go about making this Virtual drive? I haven't a clue. Must there be a virtual drive for every program that requires the CD in a drive? It beats me why copy protection isn't adequate.

Personally, I think CD install programs are WAY too slow (FS2002 and im guessing FS2004 is like this too), even on my 54x CD-ROM. So, I just image the CD's and load them up, and I can go about 150x-200x peak right off my HD. It seems to cut the installing process easily by half. It is also useful when you dont want to keep a CD inside the drive at all times.It is really easy to make a virtual CD drive. You just need a CD image maker (CloneCD or CDRWin for example), and a program called Virtual Daemon. Virtual Daemon installs a fake SCSI CD/DVD drive in Windows, and it acts like a real drive in every way.All you gotta do is image the CD, and mount it with Virtual Daemon. If you need help with this, I could show you how to do it.

There are a variety of ways to create a Virtual CD but the best tool to use is Alcohol 120% available from http://www.alcohol-soft.com/It can create an image and it also can install up to 31 virtual drives so you can run multiple CDs concurrently. ;-)There are some other features regarding protection schemes which I suppose I can't discuss on this forum.

You don't need a virtual cd to run FS2004. There are already dozens of working no-cd patches available. Unfortunately the mods won't let me tell you where they are.