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TBIMount – Readme Notes

Removable Media

You can only mount image files where all the associated files are always available.  In other words, you can't mount image files that spans across removable media and expect it to work properly.

Read-Only Media and Old Windows Versions

Windows NT and Windows 2000 do not support mounting of NTFS partitions from Read-Only media. Since the image files are mounted read-only, this means you will not be able to access NTFS partitions on those Operating  Systems.  FAT type partitions will still be accessible and TBIView can be used to access NTFS partitions on those platforms.

Visibility

Under Vista and later, the mounted drive will only be visible to the user who mounted it.

Permissions

Because windows is natively accessing the file system, all user permissions remain in effect. This means a normal user can't access other users folders. To get access to all normal files you can run TBIMount as an administrator (right click the shortcut and choose run as administrator). The drive letter you mount as administrator will also only be visible to the elevated administrator. This means that any other application that needs access to the drive letter will also need to be run as administrator in the same way. Windows explorer is different because it may continue to run as a normal user even when it acts like it's going to elevate. To prevent this you need to make a change to the Windows Explorer options:

  • Open Windows explorer
  • From the menu bar choose Tools/Folder Options
  • Choose the view tab and enable the "Launch folder windows in a separate process" option located in the Advanced Settings box.

Now even though you have that enabled, if you have any explorer windows open (anything like my computer/viewing a folder/etc) as a normal user then it will still only launch as the normal user. To prevent this, close all open windows explorer based windows. Once you do that and use right-click, run as administrator you'll actually be running as administrator. Note that any other window you open will also be running as administrator until all windows explorer windows are closed. If you're still having problems getting it to elevate properly, you may have a hidden explorer.exe process running. To fix this, bring up the windows task manager and end all the explorer.exe processes. one of them will make your  desktop go blank, but don't worry about that. Once you end all processes choose the menu option File / New Task (Run..) and type explorer then click ok (that starts up your desktop again).

Custom File Manager

You can setup a custom file manager for TBIMount to launch by setting up a registry string value named FileManager under the HKLM\Software\TeraByte Unlimited\TBIMount key. You must supply the .exe extension and the parameter passed to the launched application is the root path of the newly mounted drive.

Unmountable Partitions

Under Vista if you attempt to mount an unmountable partition such as a blank partition it will give you the option to format or refuse to open.  If you then unmount all existing TBIMounted drives (stops TBIMount Service) and attempt to mount again (or start TBIMount driver) it will fail with  System error 2 has occurred.   The system cannot find the file specified.   While we haven't done extensive diagnosing of why, using the a debug version of the driver shows that TBIMount (DriverEntry) isn't even called. To fix this situation you have to close all explorer.exe processes then launch explorer.exe (from task manager under File / New Task (Run..) and wait about 10 seconds and TBIMount will be able to start again.

Direct Burned Optical Media

Direct burned CD/DVD/BD discs may result with "Error 3 while reading meta data from TBI file.". This is because the last disc of a direct burned disc has file sizes that include unused areas of the disc. This cause windows read-ahead feature to report any reads that would extend beyond the used space to be reported as a read failure with zero bytes read. The reason Image creates discs with the full disc allocated as files and doesn't burn extra sessions for the last disc is because it tries to use all the disc rather than using some arbitrary number of reserved sectors for session closing at the end. When media was expensive there was a desire to not push a a small amount of data to another disc when it would actually fit and there is no reliable method to determine the number of sectors a drive/media will require to close an existing session and open/close a new one. The work around is to use TBICD2HD to copy the files off the CD/DVD/BD then use those files or burn another disc using BINGBURN. The new disc will not have the Error 3 issue.

Options

By default there can be a maximum of 4 tbi files mounted. To change this value setup a DWORD value named MaxMount under the registry key:

\HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\TBIMount\Parameters
The valid range for the value is 1 to 20.

You can adjust the internal indexes used by TBIMount by adjusting a DWORD value named Markers under the registry key:


\HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\TBIMount\Parameters
The valid range for the value is 20 to 500, the default is 100.

Larger values may be slower on systems with a slow CPU, but may be faster when the file is on a slow IO device. Lower values may speed up access on systems with a slow CPU, but may slow down access on a slower IO device.

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