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Mounting .ISO's Into An NT File System?
haplo21112 asks: "We all know how to mount an ISO image into the Linux file system:
mount -t iso9660 -o loop image.iso /mnt/isoimage.
Unfortunately the rather large software distribution server I am stuck with here at work is 2000 based, but we would love to replicate this functionality somehow on the NT System. I have done many Google searches to find a way of doing this and come up empty. There seem to many utilities that will mount the .ISO as a 'virtual' CD rom drive, but this doesn't really solve the problem since we are talking about mounting something on the order of 200 .ISO images this way.
I am looking to replicate the Linux functionality, create a directory, and mount the ISOs as subdirectories."
use linux.
my god, that was simple.
At least your Windows boxen would see them, no?
You could've hired me.
Why not mount them as virtual drives (as with the utilities you found) and then use the SUBST command to map that virtual drive into a subdirectory?
.iso's needed?
/?
/D
/D Deletes a substituted (virtual) drive.
(Disk Management lets you do this too.)
You'd have to get fancy to get past 26 drive letters though, maybe a batch file to switch in the
C:\>subst
Associates a path with a drive letter.
SUBST [drive1: [drive2:]path]
SUBST drive1:
drive1: Specifies a virtual drive to which you want to assign a path.
[drive2:]path Specifies a physical drive and path you want to assign to
a virtual drive.
Type SUBST with no parameters to display a list of current virtual drives.
I got a free copy of norton virtual drive with my last motherboard, it copies the contents of the CD and stores them as a fake partition. As far as I know win2k also will let you mount/map... a partition as a directory onto another drive partition. However I don't know what kind of partition Norton makes the virtual drives, if they are fat, kinda screwed in a 2K enviormentl. No permissions and doubt you can map them to a folder. My $0.02
Why do you need to mount ISOs, rather than just copy the contents of the CD to a subdirectory?
That almost seems like a backward way to do it, unless you were anticipating installing these ISOs on a Linux system.
the old version worked
i tried the new one last week with freebsd 4.4 iso's and it failed though
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Windows 2000 has a lot of directory restructuring tools available for you.
SUBST, JOIN, and the like tools from old-school MS DOS let you map directories to drive letters and vice versa.
Windows 2000 also includes a copy of what is, pretty much, Vetrias Voulme Manager, used for making software RAID arrays (called "Dynamic drives") and such. Maybe you could use it (It's found in Administrative Tools>Computer Managment) to do something of that nature. There's a LOT of options about removable media, media pools, and volume management there.
Also check in the MSKB. It's actually helpful if you know what you're looking for.
Microsoft have one - vcd.exe is the installer.
2-10-2000 18:25 24,064 VCdControlTool.exe
2-10-2000 18:05 11,296 VCdRom.sys
I can't remember how I got it though - possibly the Windows XP beta program.
Mmmmmmm
700MB * 200 ISOs = 140GB
140GB / 1 Gb/sec = 19 min.
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Aside from being one of the best pieces of software to burn CS (and so much more), NERO by Ahead Software
.iso images as drives on your Win32 system.
http://www.nero.com/en/function.htm
Has a SCSI/Image interpreter that mounts
Interesting topic, because I was just thinking about this the other day. I'm planning on building an ISO server, and you should consider the same.
/dev/loopN and iso9660 support.
The server will be based on Linux, and have plenty of disk space to hold the large number of ISO files. I'd write a script that would read a directory listing and mount all ISO files via the
From there, the ISO mount points are going to be accessible via an SMB (Samba) share.
This will allow users on the network to use their "Network Neighborhood" or "Computers Near Me" interfaces to browse the files. In fact, most users will probably never know about the ISO files, nor will they know that they're browsing a linux machine. Its going to be ultra transparent.
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You've got it backwards. The poster wants to mount some 200 images as folders, not drive letters. SUBST isn't going to help him.
For example, disc 1 would be a file such as c:\images\disc1.iso and be mounted as c:\library\disc1\ ; disc 2 would be c:\images\disc2.iso mounted as c:\library\disc2\ and so on. Basically, the single *.iso file is an entire file system (read: disc) squashed into a file and sitting on another file system.
By way of explanation, file system images are individual files representing a disk partition. They are as if you were to take the data off of a disk bit by bit, in sequence, with all partition information, file tables, etc., and put it into a file. This image can be ISO, FAT, NTFS, VFAT, FAT32, EXT2, EXT3, whatever format you can think of. You can have a FAT32 filesystem residing within an NTFS filesystem. With a proper operating system, you can mount this "virtual filesystem in a file" as a filesystem. In UNIX type OS's, there are no drive letters, but the filesystem can be mounted to a directory. In Microsoft-type OS's, every filesystem is mounted as a drive letter rather than a directory, which inherently limits you to a maximum of 26 simultaneously mounted "drives." The UNIX limitation is much higher.
In the days of DOS, it was found that some programs work best if their folders were in the root directory of some drive. Unfortunately, this made for a very cluttered root directory. A workaround was implemented: SUBST allows you to mount a directory as a virtual drive letter, letting the program have it's own root directory, while allowing the user to "sort out" his hard drive by having directories for programs, etc.
DOS and Windows have never had native support for mounting partitions as directories; this support IS available (finally) under Windows XP. Mounting image files as folders is uniquely UNIX-like; I don't know if XP supports this or not.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
You may find the following Microsoft Knowledge Base articles informative, if not the answer to you questions:
k b; EN-US;Q205524
k b; en-us;Q226545
k b; EN-US;Q175761
How to Create and Manipulate NTFS Junction Points (Q205524)
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=
How Single Instance Storage Identifies Which Volumes to Manage (Q226545)
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=
Dynamic vs. Basic Storage in Windows 2000 and Windows XP (Q175761)
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=
(Be sure to remove spaces in the URLs. The slashcode on slashdot has a bug that inserts spaces in long words.)
I think that Windows 2000/XP may not support filesystems that are not seen as physical volumes (partitions) or logical volumes on a dynamic partition. I have not been able to find anything that indicates file-based filesystem images are supported.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
Since you said you cannot dedicate a machine to Linux, just install a barebones distro under VMware on your Win2K machine. Export the ISO files through Samba so that the Linux guest OS can see them, mount them on loopback, and re-export the mounted directories over Samba. Very back-ass-wards, but if you have a reasonably powered machine, it will work.
I think you may have an uphill battle here. As far as I know, Win2K expects a filesystem to be either a physical partition or on a Windows 2000 dynamic disk. I don't think it knows how to handle image files.
There may be a third-party utility which allows this. I don't know what it is.
Your best bet may be (impossible, but who knows...) to convince the powers-that-be that the only way to implement this is using *nix/Samba and that the Total Cost of Ownership will be less than the TCO of the current implementation.
If the TCO is more than what you're doing now, consider the proposal toilet paper.
Remember that TCO includes not only the cost of implementation, but productivity issues as well. If productivity is sufficiently increased, then TCO will be lower than it currently is.
You mentioned that the datacenter only supports Windows 2000. In my opinion, that is short-sighted, but that is a topic for another flameb^H^H^H^H^H^H story.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
Actually, the spaces inserted in long words is a feature of Slashcode, not a bug.- don't-remember-what's-at-the-beginning...
Not sure which version of Slashcode Slashdot is running at the moment, but in version 2.2, the default value of MAX_WORD_LENGTH, in function breakHTML, is 50 (according to both comments in Slash/Utility/Data/Data.pm AND the code there). After previewing this comment, I can assure you it's the same thing on Slashdot.
If you wanted to entirely avoid the extra spaces, you could just have put the URLs in plain <A href="link">link</A> tags, and your research would have been more easily reused by others. By the way, attributes in HTML tags are not cut the way described above.
But the word boundaries in Slashcode could include dashes also, rather than only spaces. It would be easier to describe-things-that-takes-so-many-attributes-you
it's called ISOBuster. www.isobuster.com. it supports an obscene number of image formats, reads all kinds of discs... the list goes on. i'm not sure if it can mount an image as a folder or drive letter, but the guy who wrote the app has a few other utilities... maybe one of them will help too.
Dammit, I meant to post that anonymously!
1. DAEMON Tools (currently v2.88)
2. FarStone Tech's Virtual Drive (currently v6.2)
My recommendation is DAEMON Tools. It is a quick and dirty freeware solution which has proven rock solid on my systems. It mounts ISO and a variety of other CD image file types as lettered drives. It's really built for use on a workstation but once the drives are mounted they can be shared like any other normal drive. (Tools to create CD images are not included.)
Virtual Drive (Network Edition) is commercial software and comes in a variety of languages. It has a prettier interface and includes CD management tools (ISO creation). Personally it didn't impress me but YMMV.
there is some windows app out there called Daemon...it mounts images as a scsi drive and gives them a letter as if it was a cd...works great for me
Kenny Sabarese
www.kennysabarese.com
Not sure what your trying to do exactly here but you should probably think more about doing something like this at the application layer. If your making a ISO server then let the user select and ISO to Browse and have some code to then let them browse through the ISO an download individual files from it. I'm sure you could find some code examples that can read files in an .ISO if you look around. I'm not sure what kind of server your running but if you used IIS you could make an ASP component to read/browse the ISOs and a ASP script to call the component and display the results. Sometimes you just have to adjust your way of thinking to solve problems, NT isn't unix and vice-versa after all.
This may or may not be feasible as I have never attempted such a thing (I have no need for 200+ ISO's)... Essentially, I am aware of two technologies within win2k/ntfs that may allow for such a configuration as I believe that you are looking for.
First, a functionality exists in win2k through which to mount drive partitions as folders... Unlike the idea of using subst & such, this is not constricted by the magic number of 26 drive letters. Simply identify/create the partitions (logical, extended, dynamic, physical drives whatever...) and edit the properties to have them mounted as folers. The ISO's could then be stored in partitions/drives mounted as folders with appropriate names. More can be gleamed on this topic by reading this Microsoft article at Technet.
A second alternative, that while being more complicated may provide for greater flexibility would be to implement DFS (Distributed File System). Through this package you can map ANY drive/partition on any workstation to appear as a shared folder on a server. As the name suggests, this would allow for a more distributed strategy that would allow you to leverage several machines in distributing your ISO's. More can be read on DFS at this site...
I hope this information proves to be useful for you and that I am not misunderstanding you intentions!!! As many others have pointed out, Linux would far and away be a better, more compact solution; however, like you I am saddled with the responsiblity of working at a Microsoft centric company...and for the record - IT SUCKS!!!
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Some jerk has been replying with plaintext posts, which doesn't turn the a href into a link, but slash sees the href and doesn't break up the line. sample:
<a href=this.could.be.really.really.long>blah</ a>
err, maybe not plaintext, but "Code"
My server
Besides, who on earth would want more than 26 block devices? [Uh, maybe the same folks who would want more than 640k of RAM? Naaah.]
So now, as then, if you want something out of the ordinary (i.e., something useful) don't use Micro$soft products. I think the suggestion of using Samba on Linux under VMWare to serve the ISO images to the host W2K box is your best bet.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
I don't have .iso's to test this on, but in cygwin mount so far looks just like I'd excpect. This may only mount your iso's in the cygwin directory structure though, in which case you'd need to run samba or something like that in cygwin. Samba on windows! Ha! That'd suck if that's the best solution. . .
Thoust shall clicketh http://galway.informatik.uni-kl.de/staff/mandola/o pus.html
And download this free program. It allows for full browsing of many image file types. Enjoy!
I like the sound of using a cygwin-based solution even better but if it's possible, I don't know how to do it.
I know this is a bit off topic (I'm not sure how you'd go about loopback mounting an iso image under NT) but under linux, you'd have to do some recompiling, I'm pretty sure the default install only allows 8 or so loopback devices.
Granted its a quick recompile, but it sure wrecks uptime...
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
What you of course meant was, "Thou shalt...." "Thou" being the singular second person and "shalt" being the correct conjugation of "shall" for singular second person.
Timothy, are you being asked by your employers to include more NT issues, or are you looking to bail out of
The question posed does not help Linux penetrate a technical market niche; it helps give NT a functionality that Linux already has.
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