Re: [Qemu-devel] Mounting windows partition

[Michael Torrie <torriem@chem.byu.edu>]

On Sat, 2004-05-08 at 14:25, Tim wrote:
> Linux does not have good support for loopback partition table reading.
> You can mount a file as a partition, but not convince the kernel to read
> a partition table off of a file.
> 
> There was a patch to the loopback driver available for 2.4.x, but I
> don't think it is being maintained.  I think some guys from NASA wrote
> it, and they made it very hard to use on any distro other than redhate.
> It also required a patch to losetup, that didn't work for me, so it was
> buggy even when I used it.  (If anyone has info on an
> improved/maintained patch for this, I would love to know.  It would be
> very nice to have this for the forensics work that I do.)

As long as you know where the partition starts in the image, using
losetup works great.  For example, here's how I mounted my image.  If
the image has only one partition in it created by windows, this will
probably work for you too:

# fdisk -lu disk.img
You must set cylinders.
You can do this from the extra functions menu.

Disk /home/storage/w2k.img: 0 MB, 0 bytes
16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 0 cylinders, total 0 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

                Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/home/storage/w2k.img1   *        63   9765503   4882720+   c  Win95
FAT32 (LBA)
Partition 1 has different physical/logical endings:
     phys=(1023, 15, 63) logical=(9687, 15, 63)

The start of the partition is sector 63.  To find the byte location,
multiply 63 by 512, which is 32256.  Now use losetup to set it up:
# losetup -o 32256 /dev/loop0 disk.img
# mount /dev/loop0 /mnt/diskimage

Hope this helps

> 
> The only other work around that I know of, is to run losetup with the -o
> option.  Basically, skip over the first track of the "disk" until you
> reach the parition's superblock/header.  You need to know the exact
> offset for this, of course.  fdisk -l will probably help you figure that
> out.
> 
> Once you have your loopback device created, you can mount it like a
> partition.
> 
> tim
> 
> 
> 
> On Sat, May 08, 2004 at 10:03:27PM +0200, Lean Fuglsang wrote:
> > Hello,
> > i created a file - which was emulated as the filesystem for windows98.
> > I then made some partitions in the emulated dos, and installed windows.
> > My question is, how can I mount this partition in Linux?
> > So how do I get a windows_disk1 like the kernel finds in /dev/hda1...?
> > 
> > -- 
> > Lean Fuglsang <lean@omnia.dk>
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
> > Qemu-devel mailing list
> > Qemu-devel@nongnu.org
> > http://mail.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/qemu-devel
> 
> 
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-- 
Michael Torrie <torriem@chem.byu.edu>