Greetings @nb_glur - apologies for taking some time before responding, these are good questions and I wanted to do some investigation and testing to make any kind of recommendation. We haven’t attempted to emulate multi-partition drives at Yale and I’m not aware of this question previously coming up among the U.S.-based EaaSI user group so this required a bit of thought.
EaaSI is as agnostic as possible in terms of attaching and mounting images. EaaSI only distinguishes images in terms of the physical media type they are supposed to represent - floppy, CD-ROM/ISO, or a hard disk drive. It does this just to map and attach the image to an appropriate physical drive slot depending on what the underlying emulator supports or requires (QEMU, for instance, emulates distinct floppy, cdrom, and hard disk/solid-state-type block drives, whereas SheepShaver and Basilisk only separate cdrom and then “disk”-type drives in which it reads both floppy and hard-disk type images). From there, once the physical drive has been emulated and an image attached to it, the behavior of how the VM can or is going to mount that physical drive’s contents by default is going to depend on the capabilities of the guest operating system, or possibly the emulator’s, not EaaSI’s.
So per:
No, to my knowledge a single image can not be “physically” attached (by EaaSI) multiple times to a single VM/environment, but a single image containing multiple partitions should be attached (by EaaSI) once to an environment, and then the multiple partitions within the image could theoretically be mounted separately within the guest by the guest, using offsets.
On the whole, unless there is a compelling, known need or requirement for viewing and manipulating the contents of multiple partitions within a single guest OS, I would probably recommend creating separate images of partitions and uploading them as separate resources, just to narrow down the amount of troubleshooting and mounting/manipulation that might need to be performed within the guest, and since the original purpose of the partitioning is usually to isolate materials and/or software intended for distinct computing environments in the first place (e.g. a single hard drive partitioned having both NTFS and HFS+ - formatted partitions intended to have one partition usable in Windows and the other on MacOS).
This would apply to importing full system HDs with multiple, bootable operating systems on them as separate “Computer Image” resources as well; though I will note that, at least for x86-based guest systems, QEMU’s default open-source BIOS can handle multi-boot from a single disk image (adding the -boot menu=on flag to the Emulator Configuration for relevant environments should allow the user to manually select which partition to boot, otherwise it will quickly default to booting the first bootable partition). So it’s definitely possible to run and use dual-boot systems as a single environment in EaaSI.
That is all obviously pretty dependent on at least a general sense of what the different partitions of the drive contain (both in terms of filesystems and actual contents/data), their purpose, and the ultimate aim of the emulation. So I could also see uploading a single image for the entire HD for the purpose of inspecting it in emulation and using a legacy VM environment to get a better sense of the drive’s contents and purpose in the first place. Hopefully this at least gives some better sense of what EaaSI is doing re: attaching vs. mounting and why you might go one way or the other?
I’d also be curious to tag @Cynde_Moya here just to see if the AusEaaSI folks have had any reason to work with multiple-partition drives yet, and if so have any more practical experience or workflow suggestions!
