Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Microsoft

Mounting .ISO's Into An NT File System? 63

Posted by timothy from the through-the-eye-of-the-needle dept.
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."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Mounting .ISO's Into An NT File System? More

Mounting .ISO's Into An NT File System?

Comments Filter:
  • This probably isn't exactly what you want, and I am by no means an expert when it comes to SBB, but couldn't you use a Linux box, and Samba to export SMB shares of loopback mounted .iso images?

    At least your Windows boxen would see them, no?

    • I've done this before for a CD image I didn't want to burn. I just put it on my Linux server, did the regular mounting of the ISO file system and then viewed it via Samba.

      It shows up just like the CD would, or any other network drive for that matter. It worked for me. I would recommend this route!
    • NO....we have 200GB on the Windows box, they will NOT buy another box nor will our datacenter(whom all servers must be supported by due to 24/7/365 requirements) support any OS by Windows.
      • Lesse... 200 CDs is what, 130-140 GB?

        Two one hundred gig ATA/100 ide drives (yeah, SCSI would be better) would run about US$450... A box to put them in, say $500. Under $1000 plus the time to install and config Linux and Samba. Let's be pessimists and say its $5000 all added up.

        I bet you guys wasted more than that already looking for a Windows solution.

        Methinks you work for morons. I know, I used to.

      • Not to be a VMWare pimp, but VMWare could be a fit. You'd still run something (Linux) unsupported by your datacenter, but that doesn't sound like a big loss.
        • Yeah, if the datacenter folks won't support you, and you are afraid to support yourself, and "running Windows" is mandatory, I suppose VMware would be a social hack to make this "acceptable".

          However...

          Realize that you still have the Linux support problems which likely make you fear it in the first place, plus the need to support vmware as well.

          You clearly are operating under a policy where you can't get the help you need and don't have confidence in your own skills in the area to be self-sufficient. Neither of these is meant as a disparaging comment on it's own (no one knows everything, after all), but it does mean that your support policies are insufficient to meet your real-world needs. Ignoring these real world needs as "real", in favour of simplifying your data center's support requirements strikes me as rather stupid, or at least nearsighted, though I don't know on who's part.

          Really, loopback-mounting the .iso images on a Linux box that serves up SMB shares, using Samba, is probably the easiest way to get this done -- you're not running a changing or complex environment on the Linux box, you're simply serving files, so stability should not be a major problem. You're also in luck, as many, many others have "snuck" Samba on Linux into operational environments when faced with problems such as yours, generally with a positive experience.

          So, I stand by my suggestion: install a minimal Linux distribution, with Samba (Red Hat should do fine). Duplicate over another machine if you worry about hardware failures. Experience suggests that this really does result in the lowest TCO -- this isn't bleeding edge Linux stuff.

      • Really, it doesn't sound like your datacentre can be up to much if they only support Windows. I'm not playing the Linux zealot here, but if they *refuse* to play nicely, you should pull your servers and get them in somewhere decently clueful.

        Using Samba, and mounting the images with the loopback filesystem, is really the only sensible way to do this. It's quick, it's cheap, and it *works*. Leave politics out of it. This is a job that *nix (Linux, BSD etc) excels at. Windows is great on the desktop, but it's just not capable of handling this.

        Think about it - if you needed a hole dug, you'd use a spade. If you needed a big hole dug, you'd use a JCB. No amount of politicking is going to make the spade dig a big hole as fast as a JCB.
    • Yes, this works. I made a 10-CD cd jukebox from a linux box with an old 8G hard disk.... running Samba.
      Even more amazing... my CD Juke Box didn't even have a CD-ROM drive :-)
  • 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?

    (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 .iso's needed?

    C:\>subst /?
    Associates a path with a drive letter.

    SUBST [drive1: [drive2:]path]
    SUBST drive1: /D

    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.
    /D Deletes a substituted (virtual) drive.

    Type SUBST with no parameters to display a list of current virtual drives.

    • An explanation (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Webmoth ( 75878 ) on Wednesday December 12, 2001 @09:34PM (#2696767) Homepage
      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.

    • An aside (Score:1, Redundant)

      by Rick the Red ( 307103 )
      You'd have to get fancy to get past 26 drive letters though,
      Interestingly enough, in MS-DOS 1.0 you could have 64 block devices. M$ reduced the number to 26 in MS-DOS 2.0 (and then, in perhaps the first known example of their arrogance, claimed that DOS 2 was fully upward compatible with DOS 1) because they couldn't figure out how to identify numbers 27 through 64. I guess they didn't understand ASCII.

      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 [slashdot.org] of using Samba [samba.org] on Linux [linux.org] under VMWare [vmware.com] to serve the ISO images to the host W2K box is your best bet.

  • Norton Virtual CD + Drive Mapping in Win2k (Score:4, Informative)

    by DeMorganLaw ( 543089 ) on Wednesday December 12, 2001 @06:50PM (#2695994)
    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 not copy contents of CDs to directories? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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

    • Re:daemon toolz (Score:2, Interesting)

      by BRTB ( 30272 )
      Daemon Tools, while definitely a useful program even without the cd-lock emulators, can only appear as a maximum of 4 virtual drives. The submitter needs much more (>= 200).

      Actually I could use something like this as well, since the infamous Microtest/xStore machine [slashdot.org] still doesn't work right - never did get any of the code from them - and the school netadmin isn't going to have a clue how to work the samba-sharing-loop-mounts linux server after my contract runs out.

  • Windows 2000 directory restructuring (Score:3, Informative)

    by man_ls ( 248470 ) on Wednesday December 12, 2001 @07:06PM (#2696076)
    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.

  • Virtual CD (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Oily Tuna ( 542581 )
    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.
  • You probably have good reasons to use ISOs, but if you dont (:D) why not grab a linux box, mount the isos to /isos/isoXX, share /isos with samba and copy everything across?

    700MB * 200 ISOs = 140GB

    140GB / 1 Gb/sec = 19 min.

    • Actually, assuming 60% transfer efficiency, adding ethernet header, ip, tcp headers, it would take closer to 32 minutes to move the data:

      ((140GB*8)/.6)/1Gbps/60=31.1 minutes

  • Nero - by Ahead software has this capability (Score:5, Informative)

    by seigniory ( 89942 ) <bigfriggin&me,com> on Wednesday December 12, 2001 @07:26PM (#2696175)
    Aside from being one of the best pieces of software to burn CS (and so much more), NERO by Ahead Software

    http://www.nero.com/en/function.htm [nero.com]

    Has a SCSI/Image interpreter that mounts .iso images as drives on your Win32 system.

  • build an ISO server (Score:4, Informative)

    by cr@ckwhore ( 165454 ) on Wednesday December 12, 2001 @09:26PM (#2696726) Homepage
    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.

    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 /dev/loopN and iso9660 support.

    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.

  • Links (Score:5, Informative)

    by Webmoth ( 75878 ) on Wednesday December 12, 2001 @10:14PM (#2696941) Homepage
    You may find the following Microsoft Knowledge Base articles informative, if not the answer to you questions:

    How to Create and Manipulate NTFS Junction Points (Q205524)
    http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=k b; EN-US;Q205524

    How Single Instance Storage Identifies Which Volumes to Manage (Q226545)
    http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=k b; en-us;Q226545

    Dynamic vs. Basic Storage in Windows 2000 and Windows XP (Q175761)
    http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=k b; EN-US;Q175761

    (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.
  • 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.
    • VMWare and VirtualPC for Windows [connectix.com] exist to solve the same problems. If you can get away will running Linux in a virtual machine, those are your choices. The appeal of VirtualPC is 1) made by a "name" company who have lots of experience doing the even harder task of hardware emulation on a different processor (which could appease the "datacenter" people) and 2) configuration is a lot simpler. Since Connectix released the 4.2 patch, which fixed the screwed up "virtual switch" (lets you assign an IP to the guest OS instead of sharing the host's IP behind a NAT), VirtualPC has been pretty good.

      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 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.

  • 3rd party utility (Score:3, Informative)

    by dpu ( 525864 ) on Thursday December 13, 2001 @12:25AM (#2697384) Journal
    it's called ISOBuster. www.isobuster.com [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.

  • Two Products (Score:5, Informative)

    by danFL-NERaves ( 302440 ) on Thursday December 13, 2001 @12:31AM (#2697396)
    There are at least two products which let you mount ISO files as volumes under NT/2000/XP.

    1. DAEMON Tools (currently v2.88) [daemon-tools.com]

    2. FarStone Tech's Virtual Drive (currently v6.2) [farstone.com]

    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

  • How about using partitions...or even DFS... (Score:3, Informative)

    by NOT-2-QUICK ( 114909 ) on Thursday December 13, 2001 @10:51AM (#2698710) Homepage
    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 [microsoft.com] at Technet [microsoft.com].

    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 [microsoft.com]...

    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!!!

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • 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 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...

  • Timothy, are you being asked by your employers to include more NT issues, or are you looking to bail out of /. soon with an NT job?

    The question posed does not help Linux penetrate a technical market niche; it helps give NT a functionality that Linux already has.

    If you are running out of good "Ask Slashdot" submissions, please let us know. I could probably fire off 10 good ones if I knew the effort I expended would be worthwhile.

Slashdot Top Deals

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it." - Bert Lantz

Close