Windows 7 x64 Problem

[Sliver X]

After recently upgrading the hardware in my media PC, I went with Windows 7 x64 as the OS base for my setup. I've pretty much gotten everything ported over from the XP setup but have noticed a few problems, this one concerning GameEx and Virtual Clone Drive...

Basically, using the Ripped DVDs function would only work once until I closed/respawned GameEx. I started looking into why this was and noticed that Virtual Clone Drive was mounting images, but the resulting emulated drive was not accessable by anything.

Did a lot of research, and finally figured out this is a problem others have run into. The cause in each instance was some piece of software that was interfering with VCD in some way, so I started disabling services/startup programs to figure out what was causing it for me... Turns out it was GameEx.

I can mount and image, have it not be accessable, and as soon as I kill GameEx the drive instantly works fine. Restarting GameEx will usually prevent it from working again if I unmount the image and attempt to mount to the drive again. It's almost as if GameEx is locking access to the drive in some way.

I've tried disabling all DVD support in GameEx.ini, every compatibility/privilege combo for GameEx and VCD itself to no avail. It should also be noted that I tried another virtual CD program called MagicDisk and GameEx is breaking it as well.

This seems to be an x64 specific thing from what I can tell, as the issue is present on XP x64 as well. *edit* I just tried a clean install of the latest GameEx and the problem persists. This should rule out my INI causing problems.

[Draco1962]

Have you tried Daemon Tools Lite? I do not have any games setup to run images, but know others that have with very good results. Another one to try might be WinCDEmu which is free and open source and integrates well with Windows Explorer and is supposed to be compatible with Win 7. Just from a quick "google" it appears that many outside of GameEx report issues with both VCD and MagicDisk.

[Sliver X]

GameEx uses VCD for its ISO functionality, doesn't it?

And I figured out a stopgap measure in my case. Using Unlocker, it turns out GameEx was locking the virtual drive alright. Using PowerDVD to play DVD ISOs, I added this to the batch that runs them:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Elaborate Bytes\VirtualCloneDrive\VCDMount.exe" /l=Y %1
"C:\Program Files\Unlocker\unlocker.exe" Y: /S
D:\Extensions\Cax.exe /WAIT:2
D:\Extensions\Cax.exe /RUXW "C:\Program Files (x86)\Cyberlink\PowerDVD\PowerDVD.exe" Y:\

This unlocks the Y drive just long enough (GameEx immediately seizes it again after this) for the new mount to apply, then uses Comandiux to wait 2 seconds until Windows/PowerDVD can see it.