Today I needed to rescue the data on a hard disk brought to me, so I used GNU ddrescue (what else?) to create an image of the disk. As soon as the image was done, I discovered that the disk contained a FAT32 partition, which I wanted to mount. Mounting it under Linux was easy enough with the loopback devices, but Windows has no support for mounting disks as images.

I soon remembered VDK, a utility that allows you to mount VMWare disk images as disks under Windows, and thought I’d see if it also supported simple sector-by-sector images (such as the ones ddrescue produces) and, sure enough, it does. Mounting it was a simple matter of doing “vdk.exe open * image.img” and I was on my way.

If you ever need to mount disk images under Windows, VDK is really invaluable.