Mounting/examining dd image?

[Jon Drukman]

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
>