Mounting ISO images with powershell inside windowsservercore fails

Question

I am trying to perform an unattended install of SQL Server on Windows Server Core in Docker. But it throws this error: A virtual disk support provider for the specified file was not found.

Does anybody know how to make Mount-DiskImage work on Windows Server Core?

RUN @echo off && `
    aws s3 cp s3://mybucket/en_sql_server_2016_developer_with_service_pack_1_x64_dvd_9548071.iso C:\en_sql_server_2016_developer_with_service_pack_1_x64_dvd_9548071.iso && `
    for /f "delims=" %%A in ('@powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command "(Mount-DiskImage -ImagePath C:\en_sql_server_2016_developer_with_service_pack_1_x64_dvd_9548071.iso -PassThru | Get-Volume).DriveLetter"') do set "ISO_DRIVE_LETTER=%%A" && `
    echo Mounted SQL install image to drive %ISO_DRIVE_LETTER% && `
    echo Setting up SQL Server.. && `
%ISO_DRIVE_LETTER%:\Setup /ConfigurationFile=SQLInstallConfig.ini

P.S.: I have tried to copy the ISO image directly onto the docker container and got the same result. So it doesn't seem to be a corrupted image.

Answer 1

As of August 2021 this is still not possible to mount disk images within a Windows Docker container. I've tried resolving this myself enough times, the furthest I've gotten is a vague mention of a "missing virtual DVD feature", though I can't find any features mentioning "virtual DVDs" or mentioning mounting images.

---

As a workaround, you can either extract the disk image/ISO to a folder or mount the image within the host. Then expose the directory path to the container.

---

Neither of these are perfect solutions when scripts or packages you don't maintain might attempt to download and mount a disk image/ISO as part of its own setup process. However, software installers or packages which do want a disk image as an external source oftentimes provide a parameter to specify an alternative installation source location so you may be able to find a suitable workaround in these scenarios.