So you need to mount an ISO on a physical server that is running Windows Server 2012 R2 Server Core? If so, how would you accomplish that task without a graphical user interface?

With PowerShell of course, specifically the Mount-DiskImage PowerShell cmdlet:

Mount-DiskImage -ImagePath 'D:\ISO\Windows Server 2012 Trial\9200.16384.WIN8_RTM.120725-1247_X64FRE_SERVER_EVAL_EN-US-HRM_SSS_X64FREE_EN-US_DV5.ISO' -StorageType ISO -PassThru

By default nothing is returned when using the Mount-DiskImage cmdlet and the ISO is mounted using the next available drive letter. The PassThru parameter was specified in the previous example but notice there’s no property that that tells us which drive letter was assigned.

Let’s see if we can figure out a way to make it tell us what drive letter was assigned. Piping the previous command to Get-Member confirms that there isn’t a drive letter property:

Mount-DiskImage -ImagePath 'D:\ISO\Windows Server 2012 Trial\9200.16384.WIN8_RTM.120725-1247_X64FRE_SERVER_EVAL_EN-US-HRM_SSS_X64FREE_EN-US_DV5.ISO' -StorageType ISO -PassThru | Get-Member

One thing to keep in mind is that if we didn’t use the PassThru parameter to make the command produce output, piping it to Get-Member would generate an error because only commands that produce output can be piped to the Get-Member cmdlet.

Notice that piping the command to Get-Member as shown in the previous example also gave us the type of object that it produced which is specified after TypeName: and before the list of methods and properties.

Maybe there’s something we can pipe the results of Mount-DiskImage to that will tell us what drive letter is assigned? We can use Get-Command with the ParameterType parameter to determine what cmdlets accept input from MSFT_DiskImage objects:

Get-Command -ParameterType MSFT_DiskImage

Get-Volume looks promising, but let’s verify that it accepts MSFT_DiskImage objects via pipeline input because cmdlets that accept that type of object via parameter and/or pipeline input would show up in the previous set of results.

Looking at the INPUTS section of the help for Get-Volume confirms that it does indeed accept pipeline input for MSFT_DiskImage objects:

help Get-Volume -Full

Let’s pipe our Mount-DiskImage command to Get-Volume and see what happens:

Mount-DiskImage -ImagePath 'D:\ISO\Windows Server 2012 Trial\9200.16384.WIN8_RTM.120725-1247_X64FRE_SERVER_EVAL_EN-US-HRM_SSS_X64FREE_EN-US_DV5.ISO' -StorageType ISO -PassThru | Get-Volume

As you can see in the previous set of results, piping Mount-DiskImage to Get-Volume allows us to see what drive letter was assigned. In the previous example, drive letter E was assigned to the ISO image that was mounted.

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