Daemon Tools doesn't install adware unless you tell it to. If you cannot uncheck a box then that's your fault.

An alternative is Slysoft Virtual CloneDrive.

I second that: Daemon Tools are OK.

Unless you're really that irritated by a system tray applet, the ad-ware components are strictly optional! Just pay a little more attention during the install process, and make sure you're using Daemon Tools Lite instead of the Standard or Pro versions (which appear to be evaluation shareware).

system try applets and spyware are the same shit for me in my ideal world. I don't need/want that: in linux & osx, I can mount on demand, without services running. Is that impossible in windows, then? I should've known by now... I can't expectc much from that retarded os.

Thanks!

gaula92 wrote:

system try applets and spyware are the same shit for me in my ideal world. I don't need/want that: in linux & osx, I can mount on demand, without services running. Is that impossible in windows, then? I should've known by now... I can't expectc much from that retarded os.

Thanks!

wow what a crap post. you got everything confused, I feel sorry for you.
here is a suggestion: go play linux/macOS games and leave "retarded windows ones" alone

Try FantomDVD. You have to run it each time to mount an image and you can easily remove the adapter. FantomDVD does not stay resident while a image is mounted iirc and FantomDVD requires no installation, just extract and go...

I believe FantomDVD was one of the first to offer proper support for MDF/MDS file types too.

Windows, Linux, and Mac OS all have completely different ways of doing almost everything, you can't expect everything that works on one (or two) to work in exactly the same way on the others. The fact that you're asking for command-line tools is probably proof that you're doing it wrong; the Windows command line interface is awful, but it isn't supposed to be very useful, you're supposed to use the GUI. Also, any utility that mounts disc images as drives in Windows MUST have at least some kind of resident component in the form of a driver for it to be be able to work at all; you will not find something with no resident components whatsoever, because no such thing can exist.

Now, having said all that, what it sounds like you might want is something with an Explorer right-click menu extension that can be used instead of a system tray icon (i.e., you don't have to run anything at all, you can just right click on an image file and click mount). I know PowerISO has this (and it also has a command-line tool), but it isn't free; there probably is a free app with very similar functionality that I just don't know about.

I use Daemon Tools frequently from the command line. Most of my daughter's games are set up that way so she doesn't have to deal with mounting images or handling easily scratched disks.
For example I created this in a .bat file and made an icon linked to it on her desktop. She clicks the icon and it mounts and runs the game for her.

"C:\Program Files\DAEMON Tools\daemon.exe" -unmount 0
"C:\Program Files\DAEMON Tools\daemon.exe" -mount 0,d:\iso\swanlake.iso
"D:\Games\Barbie\Swan Lake\Barbie of Swan Lake\launch.exe"