Does Windows 7 have built-in support for creating & mounting disk images?

Question

Does Windows 7 have any built-in tools (GUI/command-line) for creating and mounting disk images (similar to Disk Utility/hdiutil on Mac OS X)? I did a quick search in the Windows Help for "disk image", which gave me info about how to create an image of the entire system and how to burn images to optical discs; but the tools involved seem to be limited to those two particular usage scenarios. Is there any command-line only support, or do I need to turn to third party tools?

Answer 1

it depends on the sort of image.

Windows 7 has VHD support built in - you can use diskpart to create a disk image

creating a VHD

diskpart create vdisk

file=c:\virtual\win7.vhd type=fixed maximum=16000

This creates a 16 gb vhd called win7.vhd

You can mount it

diskpart select vdisk

file=d:\virtual\win7.vhd attach vdisk

via zdnet

You can create standard IMG files by other means and mount it with filedisk

if you want to mount other sorts of files, it depends - I believe there's vmware diskmount (may not work on newer versions of windows)

I have no idea what will mount a VDI

Answer 2

Virtual Clone Drive is another freeware app that's quite useful for mounting images of different formats. You can create multiple virtual drives too.

Answer 3

Windows 7 does not have a feature to create and mount disk images like ISO, IMG, BIN, etc. As you have found out after your search, Windows 7 only lets you burn images (yet not all types) to optical discs. You should use a 3rd party tool.

Answer 4

I use the freeware app MagicDisk on Windows 7 (64-bit) to mount ISOs - works very well.

For burning and making images, I use CDBurnerXP (works fine on WIn 7 too) - also free.