vboximg-mount: A Utility for FUSE Mounting a Virtual Disk Image
vboximg-mount is a command line utility for Mac
OS and Linux hosts that provides raw access to an
virtual disk image on the host system. Use this utility to mount,
view, and optionally modify the disk image contents.
The utility is based on Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) technology
and uses the VirtualBox runtime engine. Ensure that
is running on the host system.
When using vboximg-mount, ensure that the
following conditions apply:
-
The disk image is not being used by any other systems, such
as by guest VMs.
-
No VMs are running on the host system.
Raw access using FUSE is preferred over direct loopback mounting
of virtual disk images, because it is snapshot aware. It can
selectively merge disk differencing images in an exposed virtual
hard disk, providing historical or up-to-date representations of
the virtual disk contents.
vboximg-mount enables you to view information
about registered VMs, their attached disk media, and any
snapshots. Also, you can view partition information for a disk
image.
The vboximg-mount command includes experimental
read-only access to file systems inside a VM disk image. This
feature enables you to extract some files from the disk image
without starting the VM and without requiring third-party file
system drivers on the host system. FAT, NTFS, ext2, ext3, and ext4
file systems are supported.
Use the --help option to view information about
the vboximg-mount command usage. The complete
command reference is described in
.
When vboximg-mount mounts an
disk image, it creates a one level deep file system at a mount
point that you specify. The file system includes a device node
that represents the synthesized disk image as a readable or
readable-writeable bytestream. This bytestream can be mounted
either by using the host OS or by using other FUSE-based file
systems.