Mount That DD Image with VMWare........

As most of you are aware you can use Live View to create a virtual machine so you can boot up and check it out. If you use the snapshot feature to make it read only then you can do what ever you want to the image and it will not harm it (I won't go into VMWare's Snapshot features). Now what if you want to mount one of the partitions to a drive and scan it with a virus scanner or some other tool? Well now you can, by using the 4 Perl scripts and executables I created. The zip file containing the Perl scripts and executables can be found here.

Now in order to use these scripts you will need to have created the DD image into a VMware machine using LiveView (this is so that a snapshot is taken and you can revert back to the snapshot, this makes it read only, make sure you do this otherwise it will not be read only). Once you have created the VM here is what you need to do, run the following programs:

vm-vol-list.exe <PATH to VM>\<VMDK File> -- path and file in quotes if it contains spaces

This will list all the volumes in this virtual machine. You need to pick the one you want mounted then issue the following command.

vm-mount.exe <PATH to VM>\<VMDK File> <Drive Letter to mount to without :> <Volume number from previous step> -- path and file in quotes if it contains spaces

This will then mount your volume to the drive specified. You can then do anything you want. To unmount the drive issue the following command.

vm-unmount.exe <Drive Letter to mount to without :>

This will umount the volume from the drive. To revert the image back to its original state issue the following command.

vm-snapshot.exe <PATH to VM>\<VMX File> -- path and file in quotes if it contains spaces NOTE: vmx file not the vmdk file.

This will revert any changes that were made back so the image will look exactly as it did just before you mounted it. This uses the default snapshot name created by Live View so if you use another name then you will have to change the Perl script.

Questions/Comments/Thoughts???