Lem - 2021-10-16

I have a question (and possible suggestion / feature request). My apologies if this question has already been asked before (I did do a search, but I didn't find anything related).

I use ImDisk Toolkit exclusively for opening VirtualBox disks (.vdi, .vhd, etc.) to either copy data from them or write data to them that I could not do through the virtual machine itself. However this only works for the primary 'base' disk in any VM. If any VirtualBox snapshots of the disk are created, then obviously those snapshot virtual disk files cannot be mounted (because they are only partial diff images, and not a full disk). You just get an error dialog saying; "The volume does not contain a valid file system".

But seeing as VirtualBox has the ability to treat the snapshot (and its dependant base file) as a single disk, and given the fact that VirtualBox's source code for doing this is fully Open Source, would it be possible to use that same code to give ImDisk the ability to read and write to VirtualBox snapshots by mounting the base drive and snapshots in a similar way to what VirtualBox does?

I am not a developer, so I have no idea whether something like this would be possible, but it would certainly be an immensely useful to have, if it could be implemented.

At the moment ImDisk effectively becomes unusable for me as soon as a snapshot is made of any virtual machine. This is because any changes that ImDisk makes (to the base disk) will never be seen by the virtual machine as long as any snapshot is being used in conjunction with it. It's as if the change never happened.

This means that I only have the opportunity to make use of ImDisk when I first set up a new virtual machine. All of my existing VMs have snapshots in place to protect their current state and allow rollback, so ImDisk is not usable on any of them (unless I am overlooking a capability or some kind of work-around to achieve this).