Offline Virtual Floppy Disks

22. January 2007 13:04 by smurillo in General  //  Tags:   //   Comments (0)

Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 Beta 2 includes VHD offline mounting, which can be very useful to read the contents of a virtual hard drive from the host, without having to load a virtual machine to do the job.

It might be useful from time to time for some people to have the same feature for Virtual Floppy Disks (.vfd) files. Just to give you an example, some tools depend on floppy disks to create backups that you may be interested on accessing from a physical machine.

This feature is not available with Virtual Server and it probably won't be (I don't think Microsoft would consider this a priority). But if you ever happen to need this, Ken Kato has created a Virtual Floppy Driver that you can use. It lets you view, edit, rename, delete or create files on a virtual floppy disk.

If you browse around the site you will also find a lot of VMWare tools that you might find useful.