3 Ways to Mount a RAW Image in Windows

In Forensic, to investigate a hard drive or disks we always make a forensic image. A Forensic Image is a forensically sound and complete copy of a hard drive or other digital media, generally intended for use as evidence. Copies include unallocated space, slack space, and boot record.  Many computer forensic programs, especially the all-in-one suites, use their own file formats to store information. These images are stored in a format of RAW file or AFF or E01.

RAW Image Format: This format is a RAW bit-by-bit copy of the original. It is often accompanied by Meta data stored in separate formats. This Image Format is most common used and is read by every Forensic tool in the industry.

Once the RAW image is created, it can’t be read unless it is mounted by a tool. Mount is the process that will take the raw logical image and mount it onto a specified directory of choice to be able to examine the contents of that image. The image has to include be a recognizable file system as a partition. This makes invocation of the command interesting as the raw image is a physical disk image and not a specific partition of a file system.

Mount an image for a read-only view that leverages to see the content of the image exactly as the user saw it on the original drive.

There are various methods to mount a RAW file. But before we learn how to mount our RAW files, just have look on your my computer so that you can have a idea about how many drives you have before mounting a RAW file. For instance, following is the image of my computer of my PC:

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