Virtual Forensic Computing (VFC) by MD5 Ltd, UK

VFC is one of the significant breakthrough's in forensic computing in the last ten years. VFC enables investigators to:

rapidly boot a forensic image of a suspects computer; or
boot a physical write blocked hard drive.
The investigator can then experience the 'desktop' as seen by the original user in an entirely forensic manner. The investigator can use the suspects computer in a read only virtual environment.

"VFC boots a mounted EnCase image in seconds..."

There are numerous specialist software applications available to assist the investigation and analysis of digital media which has been forensically acquired. Whilst these tools can and do provide a great depth of analysis and will reveal data fragments of material no longer readily available, it is often the case that the 'scene of the crime' part of the examination process is overlooked as an additional source of potentially invaluable information.

In the 'real' world, it is almost unthinkable not to examine in detail the actual crime scene and then perform 'forensic' examinations on evidence gathered from the scene. In the 'virtual' world of forensic Computing, the same is not true and all too often it is only the underlying data and information that resides on the storage devices that is examined in detail.

Source: http://www.mountimage.com/virtual-forensic-computing-vfc.php