Mount dd image with multiple partitions

Question

I have created an image of a disk using dd using the command dd if=/dev/sdb of=/jobs/image.dd. The SATA drive /dev/sdb has 3 partitions on it (one NTFS, two FAT32).

How do I mount the complete image with all its partitions in one go? I actually want to script this using Python but knowing how to do it is obviously the first step!

Thanks in advance

Solution 1

Use kpartx (from multipath-tools):

use losetup to get a /dev/loop? device, then use kpartx on it to create dev mappings for the partitions in the image file.

Solution 2

Doing one partition at a time isn't too difficult. Basically you use losetup with the offset parameter. Here is an article that describes the steps, and here is another.

If you wanted to do all at once you would probably have to write a script that retrieved the partition table from the disk image, and then ran losetup several times to create several loop devices. I am not aware of any tools that do this for you.

Comments

[Luke Bibby]

Great, kpartx worked great!