Mounting/examining dd image?

Jon Drukman jdrukman at gmail.com
Sat Nov 3 09:04:15 PDT 2007


Hm, anything that works in Freebsd 4.9?  I've never been able to
install 5.0 or higher on this machine, it always freezes when booting.

On Nov 2, 2007 10:22 PM, John Nielsen <lists at jnielsen.net> wrote:
>
> On Friday 02 November 2007, Jon Drukman wrote:
> > I was trying to transplant my system from a small, old drive to a big,
> > new one.  I made a dd dump of the entire small drive, but then I
> > accidentally destroyed the drive (be careful with bare drives and
> > metal PC cases...)
> >
> > Anyway, I have the dd file but I don't have a spare drive onto which
> > to copy it.  Is there a way to read its contents/mount it/explore
> > it/hopefully extract files from it on a running system?
>
> Yes there is:
>
> mdconfig -a -t vnode -f "/path/to/dd/image/file"
>
> That will cause the file to be treated as an md device. See also man
> mdconfig. The output of that command is the newly created /dev/md? device
> node. Depending on whether you dumped the whole disk, a slice, or a
> partition there may be additional devices. If you dd'ed the whole disk your
> former root partition might show up as /dev/md0s1a, for example.
>
> Once you've identified the device node(s) that contain(s) the filesystem(s)
> you're interested in, just mount it/them like you would any other device,
> e.g.
>         mount /dev/md0s1a /mnt
>
> JN
>


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