MobaLiveCD

MobaLiveCD is a freeware tool that will run your Live or bootable disc images directly from within Windows with just a couple of clicks of your mouse. This is thanks to the small and open source virtual machine emulator QEMU. The program itself is portable and only 1.5MB in size which is quite impressive

Not only will it start bootable CD ISO images but with the last update to version 2.1 you can also launch a bootable USB flash drive which is useful when you’re testing if your multi boot or installation USB works before trying it for real. MobaLiveCD is simplicity to use, all you have to do is run it (Run as administrator if you have UAC on) and either press “Run the LiveCD” and browse for the ISO image file, or click “Run the LiveUSB” and choose the letter of your flash drive.

The program will then launch QEMU with a predefined configuration and begin the boot process. To interact with the emulated operating system, click in the window, press Ctrl + Alt to get out again. The “Right-click menu” button usually doesn’t work in Windows 7 or 8 because they recognise the ISO file type by default and already have other programs associated with it, Vista and XP will work if their ISO file type hasn’t already been taken over by another program

Although MobaLiveCD is small and easy to use it does have drawbacks. Firstly the QEMU program it relies on emulates very low end hardware. It does use up to 1GB of memory but the CPU being emulated is a Pentium II 333Mhz which makes things sluggish during boot and inside the live operating system. As a simple example we booted Mini XP from Hiren’s BootCD in MobaLiveCD and VirtualBox, MobaLiveCD took 2 minutes 10 seconds to boot to the desktop, VirtualBox took only 33 seconds.

Also, because there has been no updates since 2009 it will sometimes fail to boot an ISO image or USB flash drive correctly, likely due to a now rather outdated version of QEMU. MobaLiveCD is still compact and useful but its mileage depends entirely on whether you can get it to work, an update would definitely be welcome but sadly the project appears to have been pretty much abandoned.

Download MobaLiveCD 

• Boot an ISO Image Directly From VirtualBox
• Boot an ISO Image Directly From VMware Player

Ways to Run Bootable ISO Image Files Directly in Windows

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