Re: Mount bzip2 disk image

It appears that Andrea Venturoli <ml@netfence.it> said:
>Hello.
>
>I've got a bzip2-compressed quite big HD image. Is there a way to mount 
>it (read-only) without uncompressing it first? I don't care about 
>performance as I only need to recover a single file.
>Uncompressing it would probably take days, provided enough space is 
>available (which I'm not sure is the case).
>
>The idea would be:
>_ mdconfig -a -f xxx.img.bz2
>_ .... use something over /dev/md0 to get /dev/xxx
>_ mount /dev/xxxp4 /mnt/tmp.
>
>Does such a thing exist?

bzip2 is a block compressor so in principle you can recover a block at
a time, but the blocks are variable size on bit boundaries so you have
to scan through it to find where the blocks are.

My advice would be to spin up a FreeBSD machine at AWS, attach a big
disk in their cheapest slowest disk type, then upload, decompress,
mount, and then delete the AWS stuff.  It might take a week but would
likely only cost 10 euros.