Mounting a file as a filesystem under Windows 2000/XP/2003
On Linux, the loopback system is a nice way to have a filesystem encapsulated in a file that you can move around. On Windows, you can achieve the same effect using the free VMWare DiskMount Utility, available as VMware-mount-5.0.0-13124.exe from the VMWare Workstation Downloads page.
You can download an empty 4GB max, NTFS formatted VMWare filesystem file and then mount it read/write using the said utility.
"c:\Program Files\VMware\VMware DiskMount Utility\vmware-mount.exe" f: diskmount.vmdk
You can re-format the disk from NTFS to FAT or FAT32 using the format command-line utility. A 256GB max filesystem is also available.
Creating your own disks
The DiskMount utility can only mount virtual disks that have already been partitioned, which requires that you boot some sort of an operating system inside a virtual machine containing the blank disk.
In order to create a .vmdk file for the DiskMount utilty, you will need a a licenced copy of VMWare and the Windows 2000/XP CD or a DOS boot disk or CD. Create a virtual machine, create a disk for it, then boot the Windows 2000 CD. Create a partition and power off the machine when Setup asks if the new partition should be formatted. Then mount the disk using the DiskMount utility and format it as you se fit using the command-line format utility.
Alternatively, boot the virtual machine into DOS with a floppy and use fdisk and format to create the virtual disk.
Additional useful links