| keydet89 wrote: |
jaclaz,
I'm finding that the IMDisk utility keeps wanting to format the drive whenever I mount a dd image file as a drive. My goal is to open an image file ("image.dd") and mount it as an F:\ drive, as read-only. |
If the "dd image" is that of a "whole" hard disk, you need to supply IMDISK the correct
offset to the bootsector of the partition you want to mount, making it skip the MBR+hidden sectors.
On most of modern hard disks, geometry is set to
nx255x63, so the first partition is 63 sectors away from the beginning.
Consequently, you need to tell IMDISK to have an "Image file offset" of 63 and set the "Unit of image offset" as blocks, or set "Image file offset" to 63x512=32256 and set the "Unit of image offset" as bytes.
If the volume you want to mount is second or further partition, you need to find it's start (the bootsector) and "feed" it to IMDISK.
VDK, on the other hand, parses the contents of the MBR and mounts partition(s) correctly.
In other words, VDK is a "Virtual Hard Disk" driver, whilst IMDISK is a "Virtual Partition" or "Virtual Filesystem" driver.
VDK creates in 2K/XP a normal "low-level" drive link, like \\.\PHYSICALDRIVE
n, whilst IMDISK treats each mounted volume as it were a "superfloppy".
If you use (as you should until you get familiarity with IMDISK) the control panel GUI, and mount an image with the wrong offset, the data in the "Filesystem" column will be "N/A", whilst if you mount it with the right one, the correct filesustem type will appear (of course limited to FAT, FAT32 or NTFS unless you have some other IFS filesystem drivers installed).
jaclaz