Mounting a VHD in Linux

epb — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 23:52:12 +0000

Let’s say you have a VHD file you’d like to access while in Linux without attaching it to a Virtual Machine. There are many reasons you might like to do this, but it’s not immediately obvious how to do so with Linux.

There are two ways I know of:

You can use vmware-mount provided by VMWare Server. I don’t actually like this method because VMWare Server is huge and I don’t use VMWare. However, if you do, take a gander at this: http://www.vmware.com/support/reference/linux/loopback_linux.html

The method I ultimately went with was vdfuse since I use VirtualBox. It allows you to mount any disk image supported by VirtualBox. Basically, if you follow the instructions at that the vdfuse forum link I just provided, you can mount the VHD to a mount point in your filesystem. Now, this alone doesn’t yet give you access to your files yet. It provides the partitions as standard files (and a file for the entire disk as well). The partitions are named Partition1, Partition2, etc. You can then mount the partition you want as a loopback device.

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Mounting a VHD in Linux