Loop-mounting partitions from a disk image

Loop-mounting partitions from a disk image

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Update: it seems that kpartx pretty much does all of the below. Thanks to Faidon Liambotis for the pointer.

Every now and then, I have a disk image (as produced by cat, pv, or dd) and I need to access separate partitions. Unfortunately, the patch allowing partitions on loop devices to be accessed via their own device nodes does not appear to be in the latest (Debian) 2.6.18 kernels — the loop module does not have a max_part parameter, according to modinfo.

So this time I sat down to come up with a recipe on how to access the partitions, and after some arithmetic and much swearing at disk manufacturers, and especially the designers of the msdos partition table type, I think I have found the solution, and the urge to document it for posterity.

It's all about the -o parameter to losetup, which specifies how many bytes into the disk a given partition starts. Getting this number isn't straight forward. Well, it is, if you know how, which is why I am writing this.

Let's take a look at a partition table, with sectors as units:

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

Disk disk.img: 0 MB, 0 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 0 cylinders, total 0 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

      Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
disk.imgp1   *          63       96389       48163+  83  Linux
disk.imgp2           96390     2056319      979965   82  Linux swap / Solaris
disk.imgp3         2056320    78140159    38041920    5  Extended
disk.imgp5         2056383     3052349      497983+  83  Linux
disk.imgp6         3052413    10859939     3903763+  83  Linux
disk.imgp7        10860003    68372639    28756318+  83  Linux
disk.imgp8        68372703    76180229     3903763+  83  Linux
disk.imgp9        76180293    78140159      979933+  83  Linux

The first few lines is fdisk complaining not being able to extract the number of cylinders, since it has to operate on a file which does not provide an ioctl interface.

The first important data are the units, which are stated to be 512 bytes per sector. We take note of this value as the factor for use in the next operation.

Let's say we want to access the 7th partition, which is 10860003 sectors into the disk, according to the fdisk output. We know that each sector is 512 bytes, so:

10860003 * 512 = 5560321536

Passing this number to losetup produces the desired result:

# losetup /dev/loop0 disk.img -o $((10860003 * 512))
# file -s /dev/loop0
/dev/loop0: Linux rev 1.0 ext3 filesystem data
# mount /dev/loop0 /mnt
[...]
# umount /mnt
# losetup -d /dev/loop0

If the partition really holds a normal filesystem, you can also let mount set up the loop device, and manage it automatically:

# mount -o loop,offset=$((10860003 * 512)) disk.img /mnt
[...]
# umount /mnt

And since there's aparently no means to automate the whole process for an entire disk, I hacked up plosetup. Enjoy:

# plosetup lapse.hda .
I: partition 1 of lapse.hda will become ./lapse.hda_p1 (/dev/loop0)...
I: plosetup: skipping partition 2 of type 82...
I: plosetup: skipping partition 3 of type 5...
I: partition 5 of lapse.hda will become ./lapse.hda_p5 (/dev/loop1)...
I: partition 6 of lapse.hda will become ./lapse.hda_p6 (/dev/loop2)...
I: partition 7 of lapse.hda will become ./lapse.hda_p7 (/dev/loop3)...
I: partition 8 of lapse.hda will become ./lapse.hda_p8 (/dev/loop4)...
I: partition 9 of lapse.hda will become ./lapse.hda_p9 (/dev/loop5)...
# ls -l
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2006-10-20 13:25 lapse.hda_p1 -> /dev/loop0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2006-10-20 13:25 lapse.hda_p5 -> /dev/loop1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2006-10-20 13:25 lapse.hda_p6 -> /dev/loop2
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2006-10-20 13:25 lapse.hda_p7 -> /dev/loop3
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2006-10-20 13:25 lapse.hda_p8 -> /dev/loop4
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2006-10-20 13:25 lapse.hda_p9 -> /dev/loop5
# plosetup -c .
# ls -l
total 0

(this post is dedicated to Penny for no other reason than the tunes I am listening to right now)

NP: Fly My Pretties / The Return of Fly My Pretties

Update: Be careful about the $((...)) style arithmetic. dash manages to overflow at 32bit. zsh and bash seem to get it right. If in doubt, use perl or a calculator.