In the older safe disc protected cds, it should work if you use a hook driver like Insektors. However, i tried to create a VD and load an image of Jedi Academy but since its a newish game the protection gets around that. Unless theres a tool that can get around that aswell then your just going to have to use the cd. Its kind of like a cat and mouse game, where the companies try to protect their cds while others try to get around it.
A virtual drive can be a logical cd or dvd drive on which you can mount cd images. That way, you don’t have to swap cds all the time.
Drive Image will give you the ability to create an image of your drive(…) so you can save it somewhere else. That way, if you get troubles, all you have to do is restore the saved image, and you won’t have to reinstall/download/patch anything, depending on the state of that particular drive at the time you created the image.
I recommend making an image after Windows and all its updates are installed, minimizing the chances of your system being already infected by viruses/spywares and what not.
Making an image of an infected drive would be totally useless.