virtualbox – How can I correctly read the cloned images of 6 hard disks (4TB each) from a NAS, saved as RAW files?

Most operating systems support some way of attaching a file as if it were a disk. Linux calls it “loop mounting” or “loop device” (see the losetup command or the gnome-disks GUI), and its software RAID tools can accept such devices as if they were real disks. The size of the files doesn’t matter.

If the disks were using ZFS, then FreeBSD’s equivalent should be mdconfig or vnconfig and I think Solaris/Illumos has lofiadm.

Windows is trickier as it only supports this for the VirtualPC “VHD” or Hyper-V “VHDX” image formats, not for raw images. QEMU’s qemu-img can convert between them, but VirtualBox’s vboxmanage convertfromraw might also be able to output a VHD (I think it can, but don’t remember offhand). It also won’t recognize any RAID that a non-Windows NAS would use.

(Once you have the VHD though, you can attach it to a VirtualBox VM and boot some kind of Linux distribution to examine the disks with – or do the same with QEMU. The latter can directly attach raw images as well.)

As another method, the 7-zip archiver understands disk partition tables and many filesystems – you can just open a disk image like an archive. (There’s a large overlap between the two.)

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