OS Term Project (VDI file extractor)

This was made as a term project for the Operating Systems class at YSU. The program will retrieve a requested file stored inside of a VirtualBox VDI file (formatted as an ext2 filesystem) and copy it over to the host system. Upon exiting, it will display all files on the VirtualBox disk in a format similar to the Linux "ls -l" program.

Requirements

• A VDI file that:
  • Is formatted with an ext2 filesystem.
  • Is a fixed size VDI, not dynamic.
  • Has a block size of either 1K or 4K.
• A C++ compiler that supports C++14 or above.
  • MSVC will not work.
  • Tested with GCC on Ubuntu (primarily) and Mingw-w64 via MSYS2 on Windows 10.
  • The Makefile targets the C++14 standard using g++. This will work on nearly any Linux system by default but on your machine you may need to adjust the CC variable inside the Makefile to use the correct compiler for you.

Installation

This program must be compiled from source. Use one of the following two methods to install.

Download Packaged Source (recommended method)

Download the source code packaged into a zip file on the releases page here. This method is preferred because it is the easiest and comes bundled with an example VDI file to test the program with. See Usage for instructions.

Clone This Repository

Clone this repository manually with git clone https://github.com/nalabrie/OS_Term_Project.git and compile using the instructions here. This method does not provide you with an example VDI file to test with.

Usage

Ensure that you meet all the requirements listed here.

Run make and the compiled binary will be inside out/release/ as VDI_file_extractor.

Run the program from a terminal and give it 3 arguments in this order:

1. Path to your VDI file.
2. Path to the file within the VDI to be extracted (path must start with /).
3. Path to an output file to write to on the host system.

Example Test Run

Only follow these instructions if you downloaded the source code using the recommended method.

Instead of running make, run make run. This will compile the program and run it with the provided example VDI file that is filled with random files. It will extract a file named arduino-1.6.7-linux64.tar.xz into the directory out/release/.