Just A Programmer

The other day I was mounting an ISO in Windows 8 via the Mount-DiskImage command. Since I was mounting the disk image in a script, I needed to know the drive letter it was mounted to so the script could access the files contained within. However, Mount-DiskImage was not returning anything. I didn’t want to go through the hack of listing drives before and after I mounted the disk image, or explicitly assigning the drive letter. Both would leave me open to race conditions if another drive was mounted by another process while my script ran. I was at a loss for what to do.

Then, I remembered the -PassThru parameter, which I am quite fond of using with Add-Type. See certain cmdlets, like Mount-DiskImage, and Add-Type don’t return pipeline output by default. For Add-Type, this makes sense. You rarely want to see a list of the types you just added, unless your exploring the classes in a DLL from the command like. However, for Mount-DiskImage, defaulting to no output was a questionable decision IMHO.

Now in the case of Mount-DiskImage, -PassThru doesn’t return the drive letter. However, it does return an object that you can pipe to Get-Volume which does return an object with a DriveLetter property. To figure that out, I had to ask on stackoverflow.

tl;dr: If your PowerShell cmdlet doesn’t return any output, try -PassThru. If you need the drive letter of a disk image mounted with Mount-DiskImage, pipe the output through Get-Volume.

For a more in depth treatise of -PassThru, check out this script guy article by Ed Wilson(blog|twitter).

In my last post, I talked about mounting disk images in Windows 8. Both Windows 8 and 2012 include native support for mounting ISO images as drives. However, in prior versions of Windows you needed a third party tool to do this. Since I have a preference for open source, my tool of choice before Windows 8 was WinCdEmu. Today, I decided to see if it was possible to determine the drive letter of an ISO mounted by WinCdEMu with PowerShell.

A quick search of the internet revealed that WinCdEmu contained a 32 bit command line tool called batchmnt.exe, and a 64 bit counterpart called batchmnt64.exe. These tools were meant for command line automation. While I knew there would be no .NET libraries in WinCdEmu, I did have hope there would be a COM object I could use with New-Object. Unfortunately, all the COM objects were for Windows Explorer integration and popped up GUIs, so they were inappropriate for automation.

Next I needed to figure out how to use batchmnt. For this I used batchmnt64 /?.

C:\Users\Justin>"C:\Program Files (x86)\WinCDEmu\batchmnt64.exe" /? BATCHMNT.EXE - WinCDEmu batch mounter. Usage: batchmnt <image file> [<drive letter>] [/wait] - mount image file batchmnt /unmount <image file> - unmount image file batchmnt /unmount <drive letter>: - unmount image file batchmnt /check <image file> - return drive letter as ERORLEVEL batchmnt /unmountall - unmount all images batchmnt /list - list mounted C:\Users\Justin>

Mounting and unmounting are trivial. The /list switch produces some output that I could parse into a PSObject if I so desired. However, what I really found interesting was batchmnt /check. The process returned the drive letter as ERORLEVEL. That means the ExitCode of the batchmnt process. If you ever programmed in a C like language, you know your main function can return an integer. Traditionally 0 means success and a number means failure. However, in this case 0 means the image is not mounted, and a non zero number is the ASCII code of the drive letter. To get that code in PowerShell is simple:

$proc = Start-Process -Wait ` "C:\Program Files (x86)\WinCDEmu\batchmnt64.exe" ` -ArgumentList '/check', '"C:\Users\Justin\SQL Server Media\2008R2\en_sql_server_2008_r2_developer_x86_x64_ia64_dvd_522665.iso"' ` -PassThru; [char] $proc.ExitCode

The Start-Process cmdlet normally returns immediately without output. The -PassThru switch makes it return information about the process it created, and -Wait make the cmdlet wait for the process to exit, so that information includes the exit code. Finally to turn that ASCII code to the drive letter we cast with [char].

I recently wrote this script to let me quickly change the diff and merge tools TFS uses from PowerShell. I plan to make it a module and add it to the StudioShell Contrib package by Jim Christopher (blog|twitter). For now, I share it as a gist and place it on this blog.

The script supports Visual Studio 2008-2012 and the following diff tools:

• The built-in tools
• WinMerge
• KDiff3
• SemanticMerge
• BeyondCompare Standard
• BeyondCompare Pro

Enjoy!