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I installed Bodhi on my Acer C720P Chromebook. Before I started an Upgrade i created a backup with

dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/path/to/image
And of course the upgrade went wrong. I could set up the chromebook again and i now try to get access to my backup. But I can not mount the image and fdisk tells me there is no partition

fdisk -l chromi.img
Disk chromi.img: 23.6 GB, 23623172096 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 2872 cylinders, total 46139008 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000
Disk chromi.img doesn't contain a valid partition table

Does any one can help me?

1 Answer 1

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Lets start with where things went wrong:

You did not backup your disk (which is /dev/sda).
You only backed-up a single partition.

In ASCII graphics:

-------------------- whole disk sda --------------------------    
[MBR]  [partition sda1]  [possible second partition sda2] ...

Your dd command told the computer to only backup the partition /dev/sda1.
But now you are telling fdisk to look for the MBR, which is not in /dev/sda1 and thus was not backupped.

In short, fdisk is correct 'chromi.img doesn't contain a valid partition table'.


Now trying to fix this:

What is your goal:

  • Copying the old image back over the existing partition?
  • or is it reading old data from the backup?

To copy things back you could boot from something, get access to your image (wherever it is. I assume you stored it somewhere on an external HDD or on an SDcard) and reverse the dd command to restore to the situation before the backup.

dd of=/dev/sda1 if=/path/to/image

To mount the filesystem (and not the whole disk) in the image you would:

  • Create a loopback device (e.g. losetup -d /dev/loop0)
  • And tell it to use the image (losetup /dev/loop0 /path/to/image)
  • You could then mount the loopback device just as a regular device. (e.g. mount /dev/loop0 /mnt`)


For future reference (and other readers with similar problems):
What you probably wanted to do is to backup the whole disk including boot record, all partitions and empty space. To do that you would use /dev/sda (without partition number). And you might want to pile that though gzip and or netcat.

Accesing filesystems in on such a whole disk backup is possible by using an offset (e.g. losetup /dev/loop0 disk.img -o NUMBER_HERE)

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  • hi, thanks for you answer. Primarily I want try to get access to the old data. I tried to mount the filesystem as mentioned but i get the error mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/loop1 seems that my image is corrupt?
    – fondue
    Nov 16, 2014 at 15:54

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