Using a disk image file as a device in a raid set (like a loopback device)

[David Greaves <david@dgreaves.com>]

Hi

First, this is not a raid recovery problem !!!

I'm recovering a disk failure and for various reasons I've ended up with
a partition that's too small to hold the file system that belongs in it.

I managed to create a second small partition on a good bit of the
failing disk and use linear mode to concatenate the almost big enough
partition (sdc2) with the temp partition (sdb2) to make a big enough
space to ddrescue the failing data.

All is now good with 95% of data on the good disk and the small
partition is holding up.  However I need to get rid of it ASAP.
So I dd'ed the small partition onto a good filesystem on sdc1.
Now I want to:

mdadm -B /dev/md0 -l linear -n2 /dev/sdc2 /space/sdb2.dd_image

but of course mdadm correctly complains that /space/sdb2.dd_image isn't
a block device.

Does anyone know how I can do this?


David

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