Bill Davidsen wrote:
Neil Brown wrote:
On Saturday December 23, davidsen@xxxxxxx wrote:
I hope I can use the md code to solve a problem, although in a way
probably not envisioned by the author(s).
I have a disk image, a physical dump of every sector from start to
finish, including the partition table. What I hope I can do is to
create a one drive RAID-1 partitionable array, and then access it
with fdisk or similar. These partitions are not "nice" types such as
FAT, VFAT, ext2, etc, this is an odd disk, and I "saved it" by
saving everything. Now I'd like to start dismembering the
information and putting it into useful pieces. I even dare to hope
that I could get the original software running on a virtual machine
at some point.
The other alternative is to loopback mount it, I'm somewhat
reluctant to do that if I can avoid it.
Yes, the partition table is standard in format if not in content.
Maybe...
Is this image in a file?
md only works with block devices, so you would need to use the 'loop'
driver to create a block-device "/dev/loopX".
I was thinking nbd, actually.
But as loop devices cannot be partitioned, you could then
mdadm -Bf /dev/md/d9 -amdp8 -l1 -f -n1 /dev/loopX
and then look at the partitions in /dev/md/d9_*
Should work.
Sounds worth a try. Will be a learning experience if nothing else.
Rather than setup nbd I did try a loop mount, and the whole process
worked flawlessly. I was able to look at partitions, read the partition
table, and generally do anything I could from a device. It worked so
well I backed it up as an image, just in case I ever want to do
something else with it.
Many thanks.
--
bill davidsen <davidsen@xxxxxxx>
CTO TMR Associates, Inc
Doing interesting things with small computers since 1979
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