ImDisk vs libguestfs

ImDisk is a free Windows virtual disk driver for creating disk volumes from image files or system memory. It can present virtual hard disk partitions, floppy drives, and CD/DVD drives, with support for raw images, VHD, VDI, VMDK, NRG, SDI, and BIN formats. The installer provides the imdisk.exe console tool, a Control Panel applet, and an Explorer command for mounting files. I/O requests can be passed to third-party image handlers or services on other computers over a network. API functions are available to C/C++, COM, and .NET applications, with wrapper libraries on NuGet. The current installer supports 32-bit and 64-bit Windows and lists x86, ia64, x64, arm32, and arm64 architectures. ImDisk is free to download and use; a voluntary usage fee is welcome. The maker says it receives maintenance fixes, but no new features are planned and its legacy design is not recommended for recent Windows versions.

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.