[feature-request] Please allow to loop mount VBox HDD images on host

[Technologov]

Hi,

Please allow to loop mount VBox HDD images on host (VDI+VHD+VMDK). One such third party tool exists for Linux hosts (mounts VDI via FUSE), but it would be nice to have it integrated into VBox and available on all hosts.

Recently a Windows-host related solution became known:

A proposed solution to the loop-mount problem by Fernando Cassia:

Maybe it´s a matter of getting in touch with these guys?

​http://www.ltr-data.se/opencode.html#ImDisk

"You can use and redistribute the utilities and source code as you like, but remember to link back to this site or my e-mail adress and always attach any following text file when you redistribute the utilities"

"ImDisk? is a virtual disk driver for Windows NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista/2008. It can create virtual hard disk, floppy or CD/DVD drives using image files or system memory. The install package installs a console-mode control program called imdisk.exe and a Control Panel applet."

Source code

Source code for all of ImDisk?, including a server-part for *nix like systems, is available as a 7-zip compressed file here (94 KB). The Windows parts of the source code can be built in the Windows 2000 build environemt in the latest WDK and the *nix parts can be built with gcc. If you want to call functions for creating/removing/querying virtual disks from your own program you can #include the file inc\imdisk.h in your C/C++ source files and link the cpl\i386\imdisk.lib library. If you would like information about how to write compatible server-end software you can take a look at the I/O packet structures in inc\imdproxy.h.

License

I have received some e-mails with questions wether or not it is okay to include this driver in a commercial product. The answer is yes, just like all other tools I publish here. However, note that a few lines of code are under the GNU GPL license, this is basically the parts related to floppy emulation. Some of the driver code is also ported to Windows NT from the FreeBSD 'md' driver.

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I think, that a small modification to ImDisk tool will allow to loop-mount VDI images on Windows hosts.

-Technologov, 2.7.2010.

[Tsso]

I'd like to see that feature as well. VMware has it. I always saw it as major disadvantage, that Virtual Box doesn't have it.