Every so often, I need to mount a filesystem that exists within a logical volume or sparse file. This means delicately treading around the boot sector, or other partitions.
Linux has a nifty command, called losetup, from the util-linux package. It can make a file look like a disk. It can also be used to mount a partition within a disk. The trick is to set a block device that points to a filesystem.
For example, let’s say I this file:
# ls -alsh harddisk.img 586M -rw-r--r-- 1 tools tools 10G Aug 26 07:42 harddisk.img
It looks like a 10G sparse file that is using 586M. Taking a peek at its partition table, if it has one:
# fdisk -l -u harddisk.img Disk harddisk.img: 10.7 GB, 10737418240 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1305 cylinders, total 20971520 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00000000 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System harddisk.img1 * 63 996029 497983+ 83 Linux harddisk.img2 996030 10779614 4891792+ 83 Linux harddisk.img3 10779615 20948759 5084572+ 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
So we do have partitions in there. Notice on the fdisk output I threw the -u option. From the fdisk man page, -u is described as:
-u[=unit] When listing partition tables, show sizes in ’sectors’ or in ’cylinders’. The default is to show sizes in sectors. For backward compatibility, it is possible to use the option without theargument -- then the default is used. Note that the optional argument cannot be separated from the -u option by a space, the correct form is for example ’-u=cylinders’.
So how do we mount harddisk.img2? Take the “start” number from the fdisk output – in this case it is 996030. The above fdisk output also tells us that one sector is 512 bytes. Therefore our offset is 996030*512, or 509967360 bytes. Now, we feed this value to the offset option of losetup (-o):
# losetup -f /dev/loop0 # losetup -o 509967360 /dev/loop0 /data/harddisk.img # mount /dev/loop0 /mnt # ls -alsh /mnt total 11M 4.0K drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4.0K Aug 26 07:42 . 8.0K drwxr-xr-x 28 root root 4.0K Aug 14 19:41 .. 16K drwx------ 2 root root 16K Aug 26 07:41 lost+found 11M -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 10M Aug 26 07:42 SECRETS.gpg
That’s all there is to it! Note that the “losetup -f” command above lets me know which loopback device is available for use – in this case loop0 was. Don’t forget to clean up the mess when done.
# umount /mnt # losetup -d /dev/loop0