virtual space?

[Genesis]

I've got a random image mounting question. When you mount an image to your harddrive and create a virtual drive, where does that space come from?

Is the space created on the harddrive where the image is or rather is there no space created at all and you're just accessing the actual image?

It's a silly question that I've always thought about whenever I mounted something >_<

[frblckstr1]

There is nothing 'virtual' in the real world.

If you are talking about mounting an image like ISO, yes your are actually accessing the contents of that file thru the virtual drive, no additonal 'space' is created.