Mounting Partitions *inside* a dd Image

[ted leslie]

interesting!

you are looking for loop back full drive device "thingy" as apposed to mounting
as a look back file system.

apart from finding a loop back full disk thingy ...

the partions within the blob have to be identifiable.
now i dont know what fs type you used (and partition type and labels), but perhaps you do.
Aside from digging into the specifics of how a particular 
partition looks, and the partion table,
you could experiment on a small unused hard drive, and 
partition it, say with very small partitions,
and then dd it to a file.
then go in an change the partion label, (and reformat it)
and save, then dd it,
then binary diff it, to identify where it segments.
if you know the partion label and type info you used on the old one
(your blob), you can then do a search for it, and then hopefully you can 
extract your partition out to a file, that you can then mount with a  loop back.
also , you can attempt to read the partion table in what you saved away, then 
use hopefully a byte offset to identify your cut points for the individual partion.

This is all doable, hopefully there is an easier way,

i wonder if you can just run fdisk on the file somehow to get it to report?
having said that, fdisk does print the exact byte offsets for the partitions,
so if you can just get a fdisk or equivalent run on your blob.




tl

On Tue, 26 Jan 2010 18:48:44 -0500
Mike Kallies <mike.kallies-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:

> Hello Everyone,
> 
> I have a disk image which was taken several years ago using "dd".  I
> want to try to recover the data from the image, but I don't want to have
> to copy it back out to a disk.
> 
> If I were smart, I could have done
> 
>   dd if=/dev/sda1 of=sda1.img
>   dd if=/dev/sda2 of=sda2.img
>   dd if=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1 of=sda-bootsector.img
> 
> But instead, I did
> 
>   dd if=/dev/sda of=sda.img
> 
> So now, years later, I've got this blob which I can't quite mount.
> 
> Does anyone know a trick to mount the partitions inside the image?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> -Mike
> --
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-- 
ted leslie <tleslie-RBVUpeUoHUc at public.gmane.org>
--
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