FsRover

FsRover is a read-only multi-filesystem explorer for Windows and Linux, powered by GNU GRUB.

Features

Browse physical disks, optical discs, disk images, partitions, RAID, and logical volumes.
Extract files, or mount a filesystem read-only as a Windows drive (WinFsp or Dokany) or a Linux FUSE mount.
Open nested and compressed disk images as virtual disks.
Inspect files with built-in properties, hashes, text, image, hex, and storage-map views.
Read S.M.A.R.T. health data from physical disks.
Unlock LUKS1, LUKS2, BitLocker, GELI, VeraCrypt/TrueCrypt, and plain dm-crypt volumes.
Search a disk or image for lost partitions (NTFS, FAT, exFAT, ext2/3/4, XFS, Btrfs, HFS/HFS+, APFS, ReFS, F2FS, UFS, JFS, ReiserFS, ISO9660, UDF, backup GPT and orphaned EBR entries), quickly or sector by sector, and open them read-only without rewriting the partition table.
Script everything from the command line with CliRover (Windows) and LinuxRover (Linux).

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Supported Filesystems

Linux and flash: Btrfs, cramfs, DwarFS, EROFS, ext2/3/4, F2FS, JFS, JFFS2, littlefs, NILFS2, ReiserFS, UBIFS, XFS, YAFFS1/2, ZFS
Windows: FAT12/16/32, exFAT, NTFS, ReFS 1.x/3.x, registry hives
macOS: APFS, HFS, HFS+/HFSX
Unix and other: ADFS, AFFS, AFS, BFS, SGI EFS, FATX/XTAF, FbFS, HPFS, LynxFS, MINIX1/2/3, QNX4/6, RedoxFS, romfs, SFS, System V, UFS1/2, UnixWare BFS, VMFS, VxFS
Optical media: ISO9660, UDF, Xbox XDVDFS, CUE/BIN, Nero NRG, CloneCD CCD/IMG/SUB, Alcohol 120% MDS
Archives: cpio, SquashFS, tar, WIM, ZIP, RAR, 7z, NSIS installers, CAB, MSI, LZH/LHA, ARJ, FsArchiver FSA, Proxmox VMA, DEB, RPM, XAR, SQLite databases
Firmware: UEFI capsules, firmware volumes (FFS1/2/3), Intel flash descriptor images, coreboot CBFS
Embedded: Hikvision DVR disks

File-level and filesystem-native encryption is not supported. See FsRover/help.md for per-format details and limitations.

Other Supported Formats

Virtual disks: VHD, VHDX, VDI, QCOW1/2/3, QED, VMDK, DMG, Apple sparseimage, ASIF, ISZ, EWF (E01/S01/Ex01), Parallels HDD, Android sparse, Windows FFU
Compression: gzip, bzip2, LZ4, LZOP, XZ, Zstandard, Brotli, LZMA
Dynamic disks and RAID: Android LP (dynamic partitions), Windows LDM, Linux LVM, mdraid, RAID5/6, NVIDIA dmraid
Partition tables: MBR, GPT, Apple, BSD, DragonFly BSD, Acorn, Amiga, DVH, Plan 9, Sun, UnixWare, SCO Xenix 2.2+ divvy
Backups: Acronis True Image TIB/TIBX, TeraByte Image TBI, DiskGenius PMF/PMFX, Drive Snapshot SNA, Norton Ghost GHO/GHS, Lenovo OKR, ntfsclone, Partclone

Linux build

sudo apt install cmake g++ pkg-config libfuse3-dev
cmake -S . -B build/linux -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build/linux --parallel

List an image and mount its filesystem read-only:

build/linux/LinuxRover --file=disk.img --list
build/linux/LinuxRover --file=disk.img --list='(img0)/'
mkdir -p /tmp/rover
build/linux/LinuxRover --file=disk.img --mount=img0 --foreground /tmp/rover
fusermount3 -u /tmp/rover

For partitioned images, pass the GRUB device name reported by --list, for example --mount='(img0,gpt1)'. Running LinuxRover --list as a user that can read the corresponding /dev nodes exposes native disks as hdN and optical drives as cdN; root is commonly required for raw block devices.

GTK GUI

When the GTK 4 development package (4.12 or newer) is installed, the same build also produces GtkRover, a desktop browser with the features of the Windows GUI: viewers (text, hex, image, Markdown), properties and checksums, file maps, extraction, encrypted volume unlocking, lost partition search, raw image export and read-only FUSE mounts. libmagic adds file content descriptions.

sudo apt install libgtk-4-dev libmagic-dev gettext
build/linux/GtkRover disk.img

GtkRover never needs to run as root. Access Physical Disks asks udisks2 (or, where it is missing, pkexec) to open the disks read-only and hands only the descriptors to the program.

Credits

FsRover is licensed under GPL-3.0-or-later.

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