When/Why do people mount

Oh and thanks to both of you seekforever and Howard Kaikow for the explanation of the difference between copying and pasting and changing in read/write format, as you can tell I was confused about that. So much too learn !!!

 

The next window should be titled Image Mounting Mode. On it you can select read-only or R/W. The window with the Proceed button is after it.

Maybe you need a re-install?

 

First of all thank you to Roger Macon for starting this post a lot of us have learned from it and I do apologize, for having taken over with my problems. Thank-you seekforever I think you are right I seem to be missing the window you speak of. When you first mentioned read/write you jarred something in my memory and I do remember seeing it before. I only use TI in the windows invironment to mount images, but one day I may try removing it and doing another install. I do all my images from the rescue disk.

 

I have uninstalled TI 9.0 and reinstalled and this is still what the next window looks like. I wonder if there is something wrong with my TI installation or maybe when I install I should pick "Full" instead of "typical"

 

dbknox,

What build is your TI9? (see Help>About).

If I remember correctly, the read/write mount option was introduced about the same time as the new engine and that would be with build 3567.

Regardless of the above, I would certainly do a full installation. That will also unpack the BartPE plugin that you may happen to need some day.

 

I NEVER choose "typical" for ANY install of ANY software.
I always choose Custom, if available, otherwuse Full.

 

In Windows 2000, there's no such thing as read-only, so read/write has always been there.

TI might have added a read-only, and faked read-only in windows 2000.
However, if mounting was present in tI 9, it has always had read/write.

 

Howard, I don't understand your statement above. What have read-only and read/write mounts to do with Windows 2000 and what it allows?

TI introduced the R/W mount and captured the "writes" by virtue of including the modifications in an incremental to the original. AFAIK, prior to the introduction of this feature you could not modify an archive and thus it was read-only.

 

Sorry bVolk, I didn't put the build number in because I had posted it earlier I guess it is on page 1, and of course like I just did, you probably went straight to page 2. I am using build 3677. Glad you told me about the BartPE plugin, which is of no use to me now (win 98se user) but will be of use when I update my os.

Howard Kaikow, I will try installing custom or full and see what happens when I get a chance, Thanks.

 

Windows 2000 only provides for read/write mounts.
TI fakes read-only by discarding changes.

You;d have to read a book such as Windows Internals to learn more.

 

I thought, for no good reason, that TI's mount was strictly done by a TI implementation and not using the OS Mount command. However, given the linkage to Windows Explorer I see what you are saying.

 

May have found another reason to mount an image. Last night I looked at an old DVD 2003. The contents of the DVD would not copy but I was able to mount and if I had had the time I would proably have been able to extract most if not all of the data. I did not try to restore the tib but would be surprised if it was in good enough condition to restore.

 

The reason I originally created the following was for testring the validity of a backup:

http://www.standards.com/index.html?ReadFile
http://www.standards.com./index.html?GetFileTypeDistribution
http://www.standards.com./index.html?CompareDrives

Mount the volumes from the tib and see how well they compare to the corresponding volumes on the hard drives.

If only interested in a few files, see whther ReadFile can read them.

 

Read-only mounts are possible for FAT/FAT32 on Windows 2000. It's NTFS volumes that will not mount read-only on Windows 2000.

<snip>
On XP+, NTFS.SYS (Microsoft's file system device driver for NTFS file systems) will mount read-only NTFS volumes, so optimally you should have support for read-only/writeable mounts of all file system types under XP+.

Edited to remove content off-topic to the Acronis support forum - Detox

 

Unfortunatly there is no such omniscient "mount command" provided by the operating system to mount a TI image file, or image files from any other backup product vendor.

To mount an image file, a virtual volume device object must be created (this can only be done by a proprietary device driver written by the storage product vendor) and a symbolic link (such as a drive letter) is assigned to that virtual volume device object. When reads/writes are sent to this virtual volume device, the mount driver (which owns the virtual volume device object) services these I/O request using a backup image file (for the reads) and some type of write buffer (for writes). Backup image files generally look nothing like the originating volume (they're usually compressed, encrypted, and contain metadata specific to the image file itself) and so the mount driver must understand how to extract exactly the right data (on a sector level) out of the backup image file (decrypting and decompressing on the fly) to present to the file system driver that is requesting it (the file system resides above the virtual volume). It's a rather complex task, so you can see why there is no simple OS Mount Command to do this.

 

One reason for mounting that people often overlook is to gain access to EFS-encrypted files and NTFS-compressed files on images of NTFS volumes. Image file browsers (which allow image file browsing without mounting) often have difficulty performing these tasks. Mounters have no issue with these tasks because they leverage the native file system drivers which of course have built in support for decompressing NTFS and decrypting EFS-encrypted files using the users credentials transparently.

 

THe most important reasons are likely:

1. To test something that requires older versions of files without replacing the current version of the files on the hard drive(s).

2. to remove malware in the backup archive, otherwise, restore from the archive would do nasty things. Other alternation is to delete the archive, betta totry to save it.

 

This is what I use it for.

F.