I have two disks as .vmdk files, and four as .vdi files. I can boot virtual machines on them with Sun xMV VirtualBox, and they work just fine. However, I want to mount them on my local computer so I can read some files off of them without starting a virtual machine. I downloaded the vmware-mount utility, but I get this error:
Unable to mount the virtual disk. The disk may be in use by a virtual
machine, may not have enough volumes or mounted under another drive
letter. If not, verify that the file is a valid virtual disk file.
Thinking it's a problem with the utility, I downloaded the SDK and made my own simple program in C to try to mount a disk. It just initializes the API, connects to it, then attempts to open the disk. I get this error, once again claiming it is not a virtual disk:
**LOG: DISKLIB-DSCPTR: descriptor above max size: I64u
**LOG: DISKLIB-LINK : "f:\programming\VMs\windowstrash.vdi" : failed to open (The file specified is not a virtual disk).
**LOG: DISKLIB-CHAIN : "f:\programming\VMs\windowstrash.vdi" : failed to open (The file specified is not a virtual disk).
**LOG: DISKLIB-LIB : Failed to open 'f:\programming\VMs\windowstrash.vdi' with flags 0x1e (The file specified is not a virtual disk).
** FAILURE ** : The file specified is not a virtual disk
The files are clearly virtual disks, though, since I can actually mount and use them with a virtual machine. I tried detaching them from any VMs and trying again, but I got the same results.
Any ideas? Maybe the "descriptor above max size" is a hint?
.vdi is a VirtualBox supported format, but not supported by VMWare.
The .vmdk files are VMWare images - you should be able to load them fine using the vmware tool (VirtualBox supports these too, but the converse is not true).
However, if you are trying to just mount the VDI image somehow....
Try this blog
http://bethesignal.org/blog/2011/01/05/how-to-mount-virtualbox-vdi-image/
This is what you exactly should watch, if you wanna get this done within seconds.
I only posted this, since the other people who visit this page would find it easier.
Thanks.
In a case of removal of this blog in Future, posting the content briefly here would be helpful. So I would extract the contents and post it here as well.
Be the super user
sudo su
Load the nbd kernel module. - the network block device module
modprobe nbd
run qemu-nbd, which is a user space loopback block device server for QEMU-supported disk images. Basically, it knows all about weird disk image formats, and presents them to the kernel via nbd, and ultimately to the rest of the system as if they were a normal disk.
qemu-nbd -c /dev/nbd0 <vdi-file>
That command will expose the entire image as a block device named /dev/nbd0, and the partitions within it as subdevices. For example, the first partition in the image will appear as/dev/nbd0p1.
Now you could, for instance, run cfdisk on the block device, but you will most likely want to mount an individual partition.
mount /dev/nbd0p1 /mnt
When you’re done, unmount the filesystem and shut down the qemu-nbd service.
umount /mnt
qemu-nbd -d /dev/nbd0
Related
I have a Linux subsystem installed on my Windows machine. I've transferred a tar.gz file I want to access by finding the location of my subsystem and dragging the files over. But when I run the command:
tar -zxvf file_name.tar.gz
I get the error:
tar (child): vmd-1.9.4a51.bin.LINUXAMD64-CUDA102-OptiX650-OSPRay185.opengl.tar.gz: Cannot open: Permission denied
tar (child): Error is not recoverable: exiting now
tar: Child returned status 2
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
I assume permission being denied is to do with having transferred from Windows since I couldn't access directories I created through Windows either. So, is there something I need to change to gain access to these files?
(PS. I know there are other way of getting tar.gz files other than transferring from Windows, but I'll need to do this for other folders too, I only included the filetype in case it was relevant .)
EDIT: You shouldn't attempt to drag files over. See answer below.
For starters, this belongs on Super User since it doesn't deal directly with a programming question. But since you've already provide an answer here that may be slightly dangerous (and even in your question), I didn't want to leave this unanswered for other people to find inadvertently.
If you used the first method in that link, you are using a WSL1 instance, not WSL2. Only WSL1 made the filesystem available in that way. And it's a really, really bad idea:
There is one hard-and-fast rule when it comes to WSL on Windows:
DO NOT, under ANY circumstances, access, create, and/or modify Linux files inside of your %LOCALAPPDATA% folder using Windows apps, tools, scripts, consoles, etc.
Opening files using some Windows tools may read-lock the opened files and/or folders, preventing updates to file contents and/or metadata, essentially resulting in corrupted files/folders.
I'm guessing you probably went through the install process for WSL2, but you installed your distribution before setting wsl --set-default-version 2 or something like that.
As you can see in the Microsoft link above, there's now a safe method for transferring and editing files between Windows and WSL - the \\wsl$\ tmpfs mounts. Note that as a tmpfs mount stored in memory, it's really more for transferring files over. They will disappear when you reboot or shutdown WSL.
But even if you'd used the second method in that article (/mnt/c), you probably would have run into permissions issues. If you do, the solution should be to remount the C: drive with your uid/gid as I describe here.
This is by no means a "give me the solution" question, but more to gain a higher understanding. Please feel free to point to references where I can learn more about this, I've tried searching and all I get are how to's for setting up and accessing network drives.
I want to be able to monitor a file on a windows machine, but the file sits on a shared drive hosted locally. If it is manipulated by another machine, is there a process I can look for that will indicate that the file may be accessed by a resource elsewhere on the network? I understand that the host machine must be available in order to access the file in the first place, but what processes are called to actually manipulate the file. Is this below the OS level? I have access to a minifilter driver that I can ask a more experienced developer on the team to help me with if need be.
I currently have many Linux VM's set up on VMware Workstation, there are some shared folders that contain source code that is held on the host computer. The issue I am having is that whenever I try to compile a file by using any compiler I get an Illegal seek error and file not recognized. Is there any way around this? I am using an Ubuntu 64-bit VM with Windows 7 as the host and the location of the shared files are on the Windows 7 hard drive.
I've run into a number of problems doing development over a network share in the past and suggest rather than sharing the files via SMB, you'll find more luck if you check in/out the files from a source control system (or simply copy them) so they're on a "local" drive on both the guest and host.
I need to create a "virtual file", a file that if some program access that file, e can answer the size, permissions, and 'say' what is writen in it.
Why?
I have a Virtual Machine that have and Virtual Hard Disk, and i need that file be a 'link' to other and far location (unknow by Virtual Machine Program)
When the VM try to read, i need to 'say' what is writen, and when it´s try to write, i need to store in other location.
In most cases the file is in a network and splited in many computers (like a Network FileSystem) then i need to know every change/access/read in file and deal with the request.
I can't modify/inject the target program (third-party).
I found a question in this site about Virtual File, but i need to know in real time all changes in the file.
I searched for File Hooks and found nothing.
I tryed to use a virtual driver, but it´s hard to find some code (like Daemon Tools, but with Read/Write).
I thought in a remote folder (or mapped drive) with FTP, but the file size is TOO big (10-50 GB) and i need to read specific sections of the file.
Thanks in advance for any help.
(Windows)
What you are looking for is called a Filter Driver.
I have some automated test (using CUnit) which require a "disk-image"-file (raw copy of a disk) to be "mounted" in windows and explored. I have previously used a tool/library called "FileDisk-17" , but this doesn't seem to work on my Windows 7 (64bit).
Update
I should point out, that changing the image-format (to say VHD) is not at option.
Any suggestions as to other (perhaps better supported) tools or libraries for mouting the file? The project is coded in ANSI C and compiled using MinGW.
Best regards!
Søren
Edit: Searching Bing for +filedisk 64 brings up a 64bit build of FileDisk, the utility you refer to:
http://www.winimage.com/misc/filedisk64.htm
And FileDisk-15 signed for 64bit here:
http://www.acc.umu.se/~bosse/
I can't vouch for it as I have never used it and am not familiar with the author.
Alternatively:
If you have a VHD, you can mount that in windows easily:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc708295(WS.10).aspx
See also:
http://www.petri.co.il/mounting-vhd-files-with-vhdmount.htm
Since you have a raw DD image not a VHD, you will need to convert it first:
http://www.bebits.com/app/4554
Or qemu-img.exe can also do this:
qemu-img.exe convert -f raw rawdisk.img -O vpc rawdisk.vhd
Alternatively, you can create an empty VHD, and use DD to copy the raw image to the VHD, by opening the VHD as a raw device.
I faced this problem recently and found ImDisk to be an extremely nice solution:
Free, with source available and a very flexible open source license
Trivial setup (I have seen filedisk64 (in the accepted answer) described as having a "technical" setup)
Straightforward GUI and command-line access
Worked on Windows 7 64-bit
Seems to happily mount any kind of filesystem recognised by Windows (in my case, FAT16)
Works with files containing
Raw partitions
Entire raw disks (i.e. including the MBR and one or more partitions; which partition to mount can be selected)
VHD files (which it turns out are just raw partitions or disks with a 512-byte footer appended!)
Also can create RAM drives -- either initially empty or based on an existing disk image! (Very neat I must say!)
I did encounter minor issues trying to unmount drives. I was unable to unmount a drive from the GUI right-click context menu as the drive appeared to be "in use" by the explorer.exe process. Closing the Explorer window and using imdisk -d -m X: also didn't work; however imdisk -D -m X: (-D "forces" an unmount, whatever that means) did. This worked even if the drive was visible in an open Explorer window, without appearing to create any problems. However even after the drive appeared to have fully unmounted, an imdisk -l to list all available devices would still report that \Device\ImDisk0 exists, and if you remount the drive later, both that and \Device\ImDisk1 will appear in the output of imdisk -l (and so on with more unmount/remount cycles). This didn't create any problems with actually using the mounted drive when I tried a few unmount/remount cycles, though it theoretically might if you perform this many times between reboots.
ImDisk was invaluable for transferring the contents of a 1.5Gb disk drive with one FAT16 DOS partition from an ancient 486 machine.