Tip: FUSE-mount a disk image with Windows drive letters

guestmount is the libguestfs tool for taking a disk image and mounting it under the host filesystem. This works great for Linux disk images:

$ virt-builder centos-7.2
$ mkdir /tmp/mnt
$ guestmount -a centos-7.2.img -i /tmp/mnt
$ ls /tmp/mnt
bin   dev  home  lib64       media  opt   root  sbin  sys  usr
boot  etc  lib   lost+found  mnt    proc  run   srv   tmp  var
$ guestunmount /tmp/mnt

Those files under /tmp/mnt are inside the centos-7.2.img disk image file, and you can read and write them.

guestmount is fine for Windows disk images too, except when Windows has multiple drives, C:, D:, etc., because in that case you’ll only “see” the contents of the C: drive.

But guestmount is nowadays just a wrapper around the “mount-local” API in libguestfs, and you can use that API directly if you want to do anything a bit more complicated … such as exposing Windows drive letters.

Here is a Perl script which uses the mount-local API directly to do this:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Sys::Guestfs;
$| = 1;
die "usage: $0 mountpoint disk.img" if @ARGV < 2;
my $mp = shift @ARGV;
my $g = new Sys::Guestfs;
$g->add_drive_opts ($_) foreach @ARGV;
$g->launch;
my @roots = $g->inspect_os;
die "$0: no operating system found" if @roots != 1;
my $root = $roots[0];
die "$0: not Windows" if $g->inspect_get_type ($root) ne "windows";
my %map = $g->inspect_get_drive_mappings ($root);
foreach (keys %map) {
    $g->mkmountpoint ("/$_");
    eval { $g->mount ($map{$_}, "/$_") };
    warn "$@ (ignored)\n" if $@;
}
$g->mount_local ($mp);
print "filesystem mounted on $mp\n";
$g->mount_local_run;
$g->shutdown;

You can use it like this:

$ mkdir /tmp/mnt
$ ./drive-letters.pl /tmp/mnt windows7.img
filesystem ready on /tmp/mnt

in another window:

$ cd /tmp/mnt
$ ls
C  D
$ cd C
$ ls
Documents and Settings
PerfLogs
ProgramData
Program Files
[etc]
$ cd ../..
$ guestunmount /tmp/mnt

(Thanks to Pino Toscano for working out the details)