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

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

The ability to mount an ISO file was added since Windows 8 so before that you have to use a 3^rd party solution. Windows 8 also introduced support for VHDX format, before that we can only mount VHD in Windows 7 as Journeyman Geek mentioned. But Windows 7 can mount another image format: WIM/ESD, which can be managed with DISM, or ImageX in older Windows

ImageX is a command-line tool in Windows Vista that you can use to create and manage Windows image (.wim) files. A .wim file contains one or more volume images, disk volumes that contain images of an installed Windows operating system.

To modify your volume images, you must install the Windows Imaging File System Filter (WIM FS Filter) driver on a computer running Windows XP with Service Pack 2 (SP2), Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 1 (SP1), or Windows Vista. Installing the WIM FS Filter driver enables you to mount a .wim file as if it were a directory and to browse, to copy, to paste, and to edit the volume images from a file management tool, such as Windows Explorer, without extracting or recreating the image.

There's another format called FFU which was available since at least the Windows Phone 8 era but MS added support for it in mainstream Windows probably from Windows 10, and you can also manage it with DISM

See also

• WIM vs. VHD vs. FFU: comparing image file formats
• Is it possible to make a full image backup of an SSD on Windows?
• What is the most efficient, native way to image a Windows partition?

Answer 4

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 5

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.