Arsenal Recon Launches Disk Image Mounter for Windows

Arsenal Recon announced the release of Arsenal Image Mounter.

It mounts the contents of disk images as complete disks in Windows. It includes a virtual SCSI adapter (via a Storport miniport driver) which allows users to benefit from disk-specific features in Windows like integration with Disk Manager, access to Volume Shadow Copies, and more. As far as Windows is concerned, the contents of disk images mounted ‘real’ SCSI disks.

Why was Arsenal Image Mounter developed?
Many disk image mounting solutions mount the contents of disk images as shares or partitions (rather than complete disks), which limits their usefulness. While developing the computer forensics tool Registry Recon, the company found existing disk image mounting solutions lacking and built its own.

“While Arsenal Image Mounter was initially developed to address computer forensics needs, there are very powerful applications for our technology in the broader IT industry… particularly when it comes to storage applications,” says Mark Spencer, president, Arsenal Recon.

Who is Arsenal Image Mounter geared towards?
The software is built primarily for developers who would like to integrate the technology into their own projects. Source code is available on GitHub. Knowing how important the functionality is to the digital forensics community however, a sample application for end users called MountTool has also been released.

Why use dual licensing?
Dual-licensing allows open source projects to take advantage of the technology for free under an open source license, but requires commercial projects to obtain an alternative license which funds additional development.

“We can now get disk images to show up as physical disks in Windows rather than network drives. This means that tools like vssadmin (and others) that require complete disks will finally work right without having to further process the disk images,” said David Cowen, partner, G-C Partners, LLC.

“Arsenal Image Mounter is a breakthrough in disk image mounting on Windows,” said Jimmy Weg, agent-in-charge, computer crime unit, Montana division of Criminal Investigation.