Mounting image file in VMWare

yes, you can mount your image easily with live view and VMWare.
Live View is available at http//liveview.sourceforge.net/
I recommend to have an internet connection while installing live view, because some aditional parts of VMWare are downloaded automatically.

Have fun
Chris

Liveview (free) or VFC (commercial).
VFC will cope a little better than liveview in quite a few situations, though liveview works for prolly 80-90% of stuff in my experience.

Live View and VMware works a treat, use it most days,
though in my experience i have to manaully set the OS. but thats no huge issue

Thanks for the quick response…I'll give it a whirl.

There are some tips here as well

http//www.forensicfocus.com/downloads/virtual-machines-forensics-analysis.pdf

As usual, Brett has authored a great resource on a topic of signiificant interest. FWIW, I posted a short article on booting images at http//forensicwiki.com/index.php?title=Virtual_Machine. It's a litte dated, but still works under the circumstances cited. Be aware that booting Vista images presents a new ballgame, in terms of registry and driver edits and activation. VFC does an impressive job in most cases, though it is costly. It does handle E01 files, in conjunction with Mount Image Pro. Concerning VMware's mount utility, I siggest you get the edition that comes with the Disk Developers Kit (free). It will handle Vista images (vmdks) when the standard edition will not. I've found that the latest VMware (6.5) version still has problems mounting disks, with Vista and with multi-partition XP systems.