Please watch out for the adware offered during install.Ĭlick the Open button and browse for the disk image to load. The good thing about PowerISO is its ability to handle multi partition VDI virtual disks in addition to VHD and VMDK. It allows you to open and access disk image files, including VHD, VDI and VMDK images. To remove the virtual drive, open the OSFMount user interface, highlight the drive in the list and press Dismount or “Dismount all & Exit”.Īlthough PowerISO is a shareware program costing $29.95, the trial version can be used indefinitely with a nag window on startup. The wizard will jump to step 4 where you don’t need to change anything apart from maybe the drive letter. Firstly, browse for a virtual image file and then select a partition to mount from the available list. The virtual disks are mounted as drive letters in this program which means they behave much like an ordinary hard disk while connected but are read-only.Īfter installing and launching OSFMount, press the Mount new button, this will bring up the mount virtual disk wizard. Passmark OSFMount can handle VHD and VMDK virtual hard disks but does not support VDI image files or VHDX. Make sure your virtual machine software is not running before trying to open the disk image, it also works more reliably when there are no snapshots attached to the virtual disk. They are separated into read only and read/write methods. Here we show you ways to open virtual disk images with both read and write access for major virtual disk file formats VDI, VHD, VHDX, and VMDK.

Also, you might want to delete, move or add files to the virtual operating system in the same way, perhaps to perform repairs to a non booting system or run offline Windows updates. In that situation being able to open the virtual hard disk and read the contents is important. Sometimes it might be useful to read data or copy files from a virtual hard disk to your computer without booting into the virtual operating system. For instance, VirtualBox supports VDI, VHD, VMDK and a few more. Virtual disk formats are sometimes interchangeable between products. Oracle VirtualBox uses Virtual Disk Image (VDI), VMWare uses Virtual Machine Disk (VMDK) and Microsoft products like Virtual PC or Hyper-V use Virtual Hard Disks (VHD or VHDX). Software companies each have their own implementations of a virtual hard disk. A virtual operating system, of course, needs a virtual hard disk to store its files.

Vdi vs vhd vs vmdk