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I think the original poster might not be up to speed on *nix OS's and files, please go read some tutorials or things, youll probably find it very helpful in the future if your asking these questions now. As it stands, its hard to know what you mean, a device, a file, are they not the same thing?
Virtual disks? Youll need a special device driver in the kernel, unless your refering to the loopback device (already mentioned by FMC, its probably what you ment). The loopback device can mount any file and turns it into a device in /dev (which are devices presented as files, btw), which you can then use to mount the device as a filesystem, the "-o" option to mount takes care of setting up the loopback device, and mounting the file system in one easy command.
Making the file appear as reverse to the loopback device? Never heard of it, nore do i know why anyone would do such a thing. Im sure there is a program that can reverse a file for you, if your current file is already in reverse this would correct it and let you mount it as normal. Perhaps the device-mapper can do what you want? Im not sure.
Making a device from another device? Well, a file is part of the partition, which is part of the harddrive, and both are seen as separate devices in /dev, and you can mount files, so perhaps thats what you ment?
And lastly, this must prove you never read up on anything about *nix. The basic philosophy in supposed to be "everything is a file", true, its gotten lost in the GUI, but the basic system exposes every device as a file in /dev, so yes, its possible to read the harddrive as a flat file, but this is probably a bad idea as i have heard, as drive geometry comes into play that can make such snapshots bad, as simply copying one drive to another without the exact geometry can screw up the filesystem/whatever. Not sure why you would want to do this tho.
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