[sclug] Mount whole-disk image?

[Andy Smith]

Hi John,

On Sat, Jan 26, 2008 at 10:18:20PM +0000, John Stumbles wrote:
> I know if I make an image of a filesystem with
> 	dd if=/dev/sda1
> (say) I can then mount it loopback and access it as a filesystem. Can I 
> do something similar with an image of an entire disk, e.g. made with
> 	dd if=/dev/sda
> ?

Use kpartx to do the heavy lifting for you.  It's in the
multipath-tools package on Debian.

# kpartx -a /dev/sda
# ls -la /dev/mapper

should show you some devices in there corresponding to the
partitions inside /dev/sda.

For example when I did this last week with a disk image that was on
an LVM LV:

$ sudo kpartx -a /dev/mapper/mainvg-domu_centos5_xvda
$ sudo ls -la /dev/mapper/*centos5*
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 254, 96 2008-01-19 23:51 /dev/mapper/domu_centos5_xvda1
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 254, 97 2008-01-19 23:51 /dev/mapper/domu_centos5_xvda2
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 254, 95 2008-01-19 20:20 /dev/mapper/mainvg-domu_centos5_xvda

Cheers,
Andy
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