5 replies to this topic

[Brito]

We are at the moment stuck with MS copyright restricted tools to handle WIM files and this means that legally it is not correct to distribute wimfltr files and such.

7zip can extract WIM files but cannot handle them properly like an image and this is why I'm "placing my wish" to see this feature available on Imdisk one day.

kolk seems to know a lot about this matter, look here:
http://www.boot-land...?showtopic=4182
http://skolk.livejournal.com/

Olof, is this possible?

What can I do to help this feature happen?

Thank you!

[ktp]

I also think this feature is a must. I am trying to get 7zip plug-in inside Total Commander to recognize wim file. This will be also very convenient.

[Olof Lagerkvist]

This is not really related to virtual disks but to filesystem drivers. WIM images do not contain any filesystem recognized by Windows (without wimfltr.sys), because the images do not contain NTFS, FAT, UDF, ISO etc filesystems. Therefore, even though it would be possible for a virtual disk driver like ImDisk to mount WIM image files as virtual disks it would not help much as there is no filesystem driver that can mount the filesystem on the virtual disk that ImDisk has created. (Windows will just tell you that the disk is not formatted.)

What is needed then is a filesystem driver for the kind of filesystems in these images. If you look at filesystem projects such as the various ext2 for Windows projects etc out there you'll see that this is not really a trivial task... But, if there already exists a filesystem driver for the filesystem on WIM images this is of course not a problem and the whole thing would be reasonably easy to solve. Otherwise we need someone who knows some about filesystem driver development and prepared to start a new WIM filesystem project...

[Brito]

Thank you for these explanations.

Otherwise we need someone who knows some about filesystem driver development and prepared to start a new WIM filesystem project

Yes, I'll start looking!

[ktp]

There is WinMount http://www.winmount.com/ but it is not free.

[Brito]

The search continues then..