Posts Tagged: vhd

Mount a VHD or VDI in Linux with vdfuse

My old post on mounting VHDs in Linux is rather outdated. I don’t think it even works anymore. So revisiting this on a newer Ubuntu version now. These instructions are for Ubuntu 14.04, so for other OS installs. You’ll also need your compiler installed, so you may need to run sudo apt-get install build-essential to get them before proceeding.

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Mounting a VHD in Linux

The vdfuse instructions have been updated, please view the more up to date instructions for vdfuse here: Mount a VHD or VDI in Linux with vdfuse.

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.