Arsenal Image Mounter vs libguestfs

Arsenal Image Mounter mounts disk image contents as complete disks in Windows, making disk-specific features accessible. Free Mode includes temporary write support, command-line executables, PowerShell modules, and tools to identify, unlock, decrypt, disable, or suspend BitLocker-protected volumes. Professional Mode can start virtual machines from disk images, physical disks, or remotely connected disks. It adds Recon Reports for triage and can expose NTFS metadata, slack, and unallocated space through file system driver bypass mode. Listed formats include raw and DMG; support for AFF4, E01, limited Ex01, and S01 depends on available libraries, alongside several virtual machine disk formats. Professional Mode connects to remote disks over a network using AIM Remote Agent. Arsenal recommends Windows 10 version 1703 or later, Windows 11, or Windows Server 2016/2019 x64 with.NET 10 on bare metal for full functionality. Linux support is described for a CLI and offline license activation. Free Mode costs nothing; paid plans start at $907 a year.

libguestfs is a free library and toolset for working with virtual machine disk images. It can inspect and edit guest files, script changes, create or resize images, make backups, clone virtual machines and build them. The project says it can access almost any disk image, including those from VMware and Hyper-V, and images created by VMware, KVM, qemu, VirtualBox, Xen and other hypervisors; libvirt is not required. Its command-line tools include guestfish, a scriptable shell, and virt-rescue, an interactive rescue shell. The C library has bindings for many languages, with examples for C/C++, Erlang, Go, Java, Lua, OCaml, Perl, Python and Ruby. Guest filesystems are accessed through a Linux kernel in a qemu virtual machine, usually as a non-root user; sVirt with libvirt and SELinux can also be used. It runs on many Linux distributions and Mac OS X, while some virt tools have been ported to Windows. Non-Linux systems may require compiling from source and porting.