CD/DVD Drives are great, but they are also very noisy, and a pain to keep changing. So if you got the hard drive space, 1.9gb for BF2, a virtual drive can save a lot of effort.
Many games still try to use the drive as a means to verify ownership, which is why there are many game cracks. But with anti-cheat protections as standard, I do not want to risk getting banned for using a modified file, plus a drive is not effected by game patches.
So here is a quick guide for the DVD version. Grab yourself a trial of Alchohol 120% and choose the Expert Installation, this give an option to change the bus and scsi names. You must change the numbers to get past the protection ( Mine was 137 and I changed it to 120 ). Then use the Image Macking Wizard.
Once you have the image, it will also work on the free Daemon Tools CC just rember to change the numbers on this aswell when installing.