.NET DiscUtils is an open source

Open source

The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

 .NET software library, hosted on Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

's CodePlex site for accessing and manipulating virtual disk images. The library is entirely written in C#, making it suitable for use in low privilege environments.

Sample utilities

A number of utilities for inspecting, converting and modifying virtual disk images are available from the .NET DiscUtils download page. These illustrate how to use the library.

Registry support

In addition to providing access to file systems within virtual disk images, the library also supports access to registry hives

Windows registry

The Windows Registry is a hierarchical database that stores configuration settings and options on Microsoft Windows operating systems. It contains settings for low-level operating system components as well as the applications running on the platform: the kernel, device drivers, services, SAM, user...

 stored on the virtual disk images.

Format support

.NET DiscUtils supports several disk image

Disk image

A disk image is a single file or storage device containing the complete contents and structure representing a data storage medium or device, such as a hard drive, tape drive, floppy disk, CD/DVD/BD, or USB flash drive, although an image of an optical disc may be referred to as an optical disc image...

 formats, partitioning schemes and Windows file system

File system

A file system is a means to organize data expected to be retained after a program terminates by providing procedures to store, retrieve and update data, as well as manage the available space on the device which contain it. A file system organizes data in an efficient manner and is tuned to the...

s.

Disk image file formats

• VHD
  VHD (file format)
  A Virtual Hard Disk is a virtual hard disk file format, meaning it can contain what is found on a physical hard disk drive, such as disk partitions and a file system, which in turn can contain files and folders. It is typically used as the hard disk of a virtual machine...
  
  
• VMDK
  VMDK
  The VMDK file format is a type of virtual appliance developed for VMware products. The format is open/documented.-Products that use the format:* VMware Workstation* VMware Player* VMware Server* VMware Fusion...
  
  
• VDI
• ISO
  ISO image
  An ISO image is an archive file of an optical disc, composed of the data contents of every written sector of an optical disc, including the optical disc file system...
  
  
• UDF
  Universal Disk Format
  Universal Disk Format is an implementation of the specification known as ISO/IEC 13346 and ECMA-167 and is an open vendor-neutral file system for computer data storage for a broad range of media. In practice, it has been most widely used for DVDs and newer optical disc formats, supplanting ISO 9660...
  
  
• SDI
  System Deployment Image
  A System Deployment Image is a file format used primarily with Microsoft products to contain an arbitrary disk image, including boot sector information.- Description :...
  
  
• WIM
• Raw disk images (IMA
  IMA (file format)
  The IMA file format is an archive format used for creating a disk image of floppy disks. This allows for digital storage, transmission, and replication of floppy disks. Files created using this format typically use the ".IMA" file extension.- Format details :...
  
  , IMG
  IMG (file format)
  The IMG file format is one of the following files:# A CD or DVD image file, essentially equivalent to an ISO file. On such a file, simply changing the extension from IMG to ISO can make it usable as the latter by most programs....
  
  , VFD, FLP)

Partition schemes

• BIOS Partition Table
  Master boot record
  A master boot record is a type of boot sector popularized by the IBM Personal Computer. It consists of a sequence of 512 bytes located at the first sector of a data storage device such as a hard disk...
  
  
• GUID Partition Table
  GUID Partition Table
  In computer hardware, GUID Partition Table is a standard for the layout of the partition table on a physical hard disk. Although it forms a part of the Extensible Firmware Interface standard , it is also used on some BIOS systems because of the limitations of MBR partition tables, which restrict...
  
  
• Logical Disk Manager
  Logical Disk Manager
  The Logical Disk Manager is an implementation of a logical volume manager for Microsoft Windows NT, developed by Microsoft and Veritas Software. It was introduced with the Windows 2000 operating system, and is supported in Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista and Windows 7...
  
  

File systems

• FAT
  File Allocation Table
  File Allocation Table is a computer file system architecture now widely used on many computer systems and most memory cards, such as those used with digital cameras. FAT file systems are commonly found on floppy disks, flash memory cards, digital cameras, and many other portable devices because of...
  
  
• FAT32
• NTFS
  NTFS
  NTFS is the standard file system of Windows NT, including its later versions Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista, and Windows 7....
  
  

Note: FAT and FAT32 does not include support for long file names.

Virtual appliance formats

.NET DiscUtils supports just the Xen Virtual Appliance

Virtual appliance

A virtual appliance is a virtual machine image designed to run on a virtualization platform ....

 (XVA) file format.

Uses

.NET DiscUtils is known to be included in the Aeon DOS emulator, Sharp IMG Viewer and YANFOE.

Alternatives

Alternative methods can achieve similar results in many cases. VMware provides the Virtual Disk Development Kit (VMware VDDK) for managing VMDK files and Microsoft Window

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

s includes native support for modifying the VHD and registry files.

External links

• Official Website
• CodeProject article on .NET DiscUtils