Patent ID: 8312212

Claim:
A method for accessing a virtual file on a virtual hard drive comprising: running a host operating system, the host operating system including a hard driver disk controller driver configured to control a physical hard drive; storing, by the host operating system, an off-line virtual machine, wherein the off-line virtual machine includes a virtual hard drive that has a file system for the virtual machine stored therein and the virtual hard drive is stored as a virtual hard drive file on the physical hard drive; running, by the host operating system, a virtual hard drive disk controller driver, wherein the virtual hard drive disk controller driver is configured to access the file system of the virtual machine stored in the virtual hard drive file; receiving, from an application, a request to access a file stored in the virtual hard drive file; emulating, by the host operating system via the hard drive disk controller driver, the virtual hard drive without loading the virtual machine, the virtual hard drive including the file; and accessing, by the host operating system using the virtual hard drive disk controller driver, said file.