[Vol-users] Mounting VMDK/dd images on OS X

Hi, just thought I'd share this, since it took me an hour or two of googling to figure out. I wanted to take a VMWare disk I had for testing and mount it so that I could get the hibernation file off to use with Sandman. If you're on Linux, you can just use vmware-mount.pl to mount the vmware disk. If you're on Windows, you can use vmware-mount for that platform: http://www.vmware.com/pdf/VMwareDiskMount.pdf If you just want to mount a dd image on OS X, skip to step 3. Step 1: Get the OS X version of QEMU at http://www.kju-app.org/kju/ , which comes with qemu-img, which can convert between VMDK and raw disk images. Step 2: Convert the VMDK image to a raw disk image: azzurra:~ moyix$ /Applications/Q.app/Contents/MacOS/qemu-img convert - f vmdk WindowsXpProfessional-000001.vmdk ~/xpsp2_img.raw Step 3: Use the fdisk to determine where the partition you want to mount starts. In this case I want the NTFS (called HPFS by fdisk) partition, which fdisk says starts at sector 63. azzurra:~ moyix$ fdisk ~/xpsp2_img.raw Disk: /Users/moyix/xpsp2_img.raw geometry: 0/4/63 [0 sectors] Signature: 0xAA55 Starting Ending #: id cyl hd sec - cyl hd sec [ start - size] ---------------------------------------------------------- *1: 07 0 1 1 - 1023 254 63 [ 63 - 41913522] HPFS/QNX/AUX 2: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unused 3: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unused 4: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unused Step 4: Use hdid to attach the image as a block device. It outputs the device it attaches it to. azzurra:~ moyix$ hdid -section 63 -nomount -imagekey diskimage- class=CRawDiskImage ~/xpsp2_img.raw /dev/disk1 Step 5: Mount the resulting block device with the appropriate filesystem mounter. azzurra:~ moyix$ sudo mount_ntfs /dev/disk1 /mnt/ntfs_fs/ Step 6: When you're done, unmount the FS and detach the block device: azzurra:~ moyix$ sudo umount /mnt/ntfs_fs/ azzurra:~ moyix$ hdiutil detach /dev/disk1 Hope this helps someone, Brendan