Mounting a .vmdk file in Linux makes life so much easier for CLI lovers. Affuse solves all the issues you could run into.
Method 1: AFFUSE
Mounting
1. Create a vmdk mountpoint:
sudo mkdir /mnt/vmdk
2. Mount the VMDK
sudo affuse /path/to/image.vmdk /mnt/vmdk
3. Check that the image mounted correctly
It should return /mnt/vmdk/yourimagename.vmdk.raw.
sudo ls -la /mnt/vmdk
4. Look at the partition table to identify the starting offset of the partition of interest
sudo mmls /mnt/vmdk/yourimagename.vmdk.raw
In this example, the Windows VM has two partitions. The main “C:/” partition starts at offset 206848. To mount it, you will have to multiply the offset by 512. In this case, 206848*512 = 105906176.
5. Create a mount point for the Virtual Machine
sudo mkdir /mnt/VM
6. Mount the VM as a logical drive:
sudo mount -o ro,loop,offset=105906176 /mnt/vmdk/yourimagename.vmdk.raw /mnt/VM
7. Check that all is mounted correctly
ls -la /mnt/VM
Unmounting
1. Unmount the Virtual Machine
sudo umount /mnt/VM
2. Unmount the .vmdk image
sudo fusermount -u /mnt/vmdk
Method 2: Qemu
This section has been copied from Jason Murray’s blog post. Full credits go to him, and I highly suggest reading up his blog!!!
Mounting
1. Install qemu utils:
sudo apt install qemu-utils
2. Enable network block device module
sudo modprobe nbd
3. Create the network block device
sudo qemu-nbd -r -c /dev/nbd1 /path/to/your/image.vmdk
4. List the images created & create mount points accordingly
ls -la /dev/nbd1p* | sed 's/^.*nbd1p/\/mnt\/VM/g' | sudo xargs mkdir
This will create mountpoints /mnt/VM[i] for each partitions/images created by nbd.
5. Mount the images to the mountpoint
ls -la /dev/nbd1p* | sed 's/^.*nbd1p/\/mnt\/VM/g' > mounts
for file in /dev/nbd1p*; do read line; sudo mount "${file}" "${line}"; done < mounts
6. Find the partition of interest
ls -la /mnt/VM*/
Unmounting
1. Unmount the Virtual Machine
sudo umount /mnt/VM*
2. Detach the Network Block Device
sudo qemu-nbd -d /dev/nbd1
TLDR
– Two methods presented to mount vmdk: affuse and qemu.
– affuse is partition specific; qemu mounts all partitions.
