VMware Continuum

dsfo.exe and dsfi.exe - included in the dsfok-tools

Author : Dariusz Stanislawek
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This two commandline tools are a must have for Windows-users.
They are required for all operations on embedded vmdk descriptions.
For convenience sake I simply copy them to system32 so that they are in the path.

The two tools make a very nice couple - as they use the same syntax - just with source and destination exchanged.
When you extracted something with dsfo.exe - you just need to change one letter in the last command to re-inject it.

Usage:
dsfo <source> <offset> <size> <destination>
dsfi <destination> <offset> <size> <source>

null size is interpreted as max possible input
negative size is calculated on current file size
negative offset is calculated from end of file
use "e" as offset to indicate end of file
use "$" as destination to check MD5 signature only

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Examples:

Extract the description from a monolithicSparse vmdk and store it as desc.txt
dsfo "C:\test-area\test.vmdk" 512 1024 "C:\test-area\desc.txt"

Inject an edited description into a monolithicSparse vmdk
dsfi"C:\test-area\test.vmdk" 512 1024 "C:\test-area\desc.txt"

Extract the magic sector from a monolithicSparse vmdk and store it as magic.dat
dsfo "C:\test-area\test.vmdk" 0 512 "C:\test-area\magic.dat"

Inject the magic sector into a monolithicSparse vmdk
dsfi"C:\test-area\test.vmdk" 0 512 "C:\test-area\magic.dat"

Extract the embedded vmx-file from a vmsn-snapshot file
dsfo "C:\test-area\test-snapshot.vsn" 100 10000 "C:\test-area\test.vmx"

Extract the last 512 bytes from a file
dsfo "C:\test-area\file.dat" -512 0 "C:\test-area\extract.dat"

Extract the first sector of a physical disk
dsfo \\.\PHYSICALDRIVE0 0 512 "C:\test-area\sector1.dat"

Change the first sector of a physical disk
dsfi \\.\PHYSICALDRIVE0 0 512 "C:\test-area\sector1.dat"

Create an image of a physical disk and store it as diskimage-flat.vmdk
dsfo \\.\PHYSICALDRIVE0 0 0 "C:\test-area\diskimage-flat.vmdk"

Clone a flat vmdk into into physical disk 0
dsfi \\.\PHYSICALDRIVE0 0 0 "C:\test-area\diskimage-flat.vmdk"

Create a floppy-image of drive A:
dsfo \\.\a: 0 0 "c:\test-area\floppy.flp"

Write a floppy-image to drive A:
dsfo \\.\a: 0 0 "c:\test-area\floppy.flp"

Create a iso-image of the DVD in drive E:
dsfo \\.\e: 0 0 "c:\test-area\cdimage.iso"

Create MD5 checksum of file.dat
dsfo file.dat 0 0 $