Before you go too far into your project, check something that has been already done, so that you have an idea of how complex the task might be and which risks you are going to face.

VMWare sells a virtual machine that emulates a x86 computer architecture and creates virtual disks. In its earlier releases, the workstation package included a perl script to mount such virtual disks and to use them as regular filesystems.

They don't include that utility in their latest distribution, but you can find it in their archives (it's quite a big file, 6.2 MB).

Thinking about it, there is maybe a good reason why the mounting utility is not in distribution anymore, i.e. that you shouldn't mess around with filesystems at such low level.

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