Repair FAT filesystem on image

Question

I've got a USB pen drive with a corrupted FAT filesystem. Now I try to repair it. So to first try what I can get from it without endangering the original hardware further, I've created an image with dd using the following command line:

$ sudo dd if=/dev/sdb of=pendrive.img

Now I want to repair the filesystem in the image by running fsck.

But fsck immediately terminates as follows:

$ sudo fsck.vfat -a -t -v pendrive.img
fsck.fat 3.0.27 (2014-11-12)
Logical sector size is zero.

Is there any trick how I can tell fsck to assume a sector size or what does this message mean? Can somebody help interpreting this output?

This question is similar to fsck a filesystem in a file but this was about ext2. Also https://superuser.com/questions/129189/cant-mount-fat32-drive-under-ubuntu-linux gave no answer.

Solution

You have made the image of your whole USB pen drive with your dd command. This means that the image includes also a partition table.

That is why you cannot mount the image directly as a file system.

To mount the filesystem inside the image, you need to use kpartx utility to generate virtual devices from the partition table in your image.

kpartx -v -a /path/to/image

will create new partition mappings inside your /dev/mapper directory, which will point to the actual partitions inside your image. Then you can use these entries as the device for mount command or for fsck.vfat command.

Comments

[Tero Kilkanen]

What was the exact command line you used to make the image?

[white_gecko]

@TeroKilkanen I've added the info the the question

[white_gecko]

8-| sure I was aware of this, wen I selected the dev file, but not now, that I started fsck :-D thx

[Tero Kilkanen]

This works when the device doesn't have a partition table and all the device space is used for the filesystem itself.