Mount Partitions within a Drive Image

[Max Nanasy]

Is there an easy way to mount partitions within a drive image? Perhaps some way to "mount" the image in a way that makes its partitions devices?

[ddrichardson]

How was the image created? Images can be mounted as loopback devices but it depends on how you imaged the disk.

[Max Nanasy]

I know that I can mount a single filesystem image on the loopback device, but if I just dd'd an entire drive, is there an easy way to mount its partitions from the resulting image?

[ddrichardson]

No, not if you did the whole drive. How would you identify where to start/stop?

[Max Nanasy]

I assume the utility I am searching for would have to read the MBR to find out the specifics of the partitions.

[ddrichardson]

Have you tried mounting it?

[Max Nanasy]

Without '-o loop', it tells me that it is not a block device and that I should try '-o loop'; with '-o loop', it tells me that I must specify the filesystem type.

[ddrichardson]

Then specify the filesystem!

sudo mount -o loop -t filesystem image destination

[Max Nanasy]

But the image isn't a filesystem: it's a drive that contains multiple filesystems. Running fdisk on it does reveal something interesting, though: each partition is named image_path#n in the fdisk display, in which #n is the partition number, although I can't use these names for mounting.

[ddrichardson]

You know, its difficult to help when he information comes in dribs and drabs - mentioning the type of image, how it was obtained and what it contains would have been helpful in your first post!

You need to find where it starts then try it using:

mount -oloop,offset=xxxx image.dd /mnt/point