six demon bag
Wind, fire, all that kind of thing!
2012-11-16
Loop-mount VirtualBox Disk Images
On Linux you can mount disk images via loopback devices. Partitions inside disk images can be made accessible via kpartx
from the multipath-tools. Unfortunately this does not work for VirtualBox disk images (.vdi). It's possible to loop-mount those disk images as network block devices, though.
You need qemu-nbd
(on Debian: apt-get install qemu-utils
) and the nbd
kernel module for this:
modprobe nbd max_part=16
qemu-nbd -c /dev/nbd0 /path/to/some.vdi
That will connect the file some.vdi
to the device /dev/nbd0
. If the disk image is partitioned, the partitions will automatically show up as /dev/nbd0p1
, /dev/nbd0p2
and so on. These devices can be mounted like this:
mount -o loop /dev/nbd0p1 /mnt
# do stuff
umount /mnt
Disconnect the network block device to detach the disk image:
qemu-nbd -d /dev/nbd0
rmmod nbd
Posted 01:53 [permalink]