Suppose there is an external disk, on this external disk there is an ISO image. If I mount an ISO, a new virtual disk with the contents of this image will appear.

Can I somehow analyze the virtual disk to find out from which real device the image is mounted?

  • 3
    DRM developers also really wanted to know ... :) - D-side

1 answer 1

No, without voluntary help from the driver with which the image was mounted, this cannot be ascertained. And software drivers for mounting ISO , as a rule, do not provide such information and pretend to be these devices. This is necessary not only to bypass all sorts of content protection systems, but also to circumvent the limitations of the ОС itself, which sometimes significantly interfere with completely legal actions. Moreover, starting with Win8 , Microsoft provides native tools for mounting images, why would it?

ISO is not a full binary copy of the disk, which was once actively used to protect games, but the same DaemonTools can work well with full binary images, and NERO can create such images. And these are not one-of-a-kind programs, just an example.

So if you are thinking about how to protect yourself from copying your content (otherwise why else know exactly which image is mounted, if you installed it yourself, then you already know), binding to the disk will not help you, learned how to successfully bypass it more than 10 years ago, or before, and there are no effective ways to combat this, look for other solutions.