Old Forum: Recommended tools for mounting... (danielmlewis)

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Alex
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Joined: Fri Jul 29, 2011 11:59 pm

Old Forum: Recommended tools for mounting... (danielmlewis)

Post by Alex »

Hi Alex,

First up, I was very excited to find you application. At work, on a regular basis we recieve data from customers on USB thumb drives, the data from each customer is different, and changes each week. We need a way to copy the entire contents of the USB drives to a Hard disk for long term storage. Your tool suits us very well as we can image the USB drives, and save them directly to an external hard disk. Your tool also lets us do multile USB drives in parallel, which is great.

I note on your instructions, that you reccommend winImage for viewing the contents of IMG files created using your tool. I have installed winimage, and can sucessfuly view the contents of the IMG files. This is good, but in order to work with any of the files I need to extract them, which doubles the space required, and increases the time taken to work with the files.

I have seen several tools which can mount a disk image file as a virtual drive under windows. I have installed two tools WinCDemu http://wincdemu.sysprogs.org/ and OSFMount http://www.osforensics.com/tools/mount-disk-images.html which are supposed to be able to mount IMG files. I have tested these tools with other image types, like ISO and they seem to work fine, but when I try and open an image crated with your tool, they fail with numeric error codes, which don't seem to have a meaning with them.

Can you point me to a Windows tool which can be used to mount the IMG files of USB? The two i've tried don't work, although they claim to monut IMG files.

Thank you for your help

Cheers

Daniel
Alex
Site Admin
Posts: 272
Joined: Fri Jul 29, 2011 11:59 pm

Re: Old Forum: Recommended tools for mounting... (danielmlew

Post by Alex »

I guess both of the tools you mentioned support only CD/DVD file systems (UDF, ISO, etc.). Most of the flash drives are formatted FAT/FAT32 or NTFS, so you would need a tool, that can emulate these file systems. I've been asked this often, but currently I don't know of such a tool. If anybody knows a tool like this, I would also be interested.

Beside of that, maybe there is another solution for your issue. You could utilize a Virtual PC like VMWare, Virtual Box or Virtual PC. There are several tools, that can convert disk images or even the flash drive itself to a VHD file. The new versions of WinImage can do this also, as far as I know. With a VHD file you could mount this as a hard drive in a Virtual Box, you just create for the purpose of accessing images. Just search the Inetrnet for "disk2vhd" or "p2v". I will implement the vhd file format in future versions of USB Image Tool. I'm also working on a commercial Pro version, that is intended to be used with multiple flash drives simultanously.

I hope I could help you this this,

Regards,
Alex
Alex
Site Admin
Posts: 272
Joined: Fri Jul 29, 2011 11:59 pm

Re: Old Forum: Recommended tools for mounting... (danielmlew

Post by Alex »

I just found the OSForensic tool, which at least seems to be able to work with FAT/NTFS. I guess I will check this myself.
Alex
Site Admin
Posts: 272
Joined: Fri Jul 29, 2011 11:59 pm

Re: Old Forum: Recommended tools for mounting... (danielmlew

Post by Alex »

Ok, I just tested the OSForensic tool with an image of a small 512MB flash drive, which I created in device mode, and it seemed to work. I don't know, whether you tested it with device mode images, but in my case it worked with Drive type "Auto" and the "Removable Media" option checked.
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