1

How can I mount a specific block range from a block device (or byte range from a file), or at least expose it as a loop device without loading the full MBR/GPT ?

I have a few use relevant use cases :

  • Given a hard drive with a broken MBR/GPT, I want to mount a partition whose start/end sectors are known (as well as block size of course), but dd'ing it first isn't an option, due to partition size for example

  • I have a backup image of a full disk (with partition table) in a file, i want to mount a specific partition from it without exposing all partitions as devices

  • I want to do some ill-advised steganography by hiding a FS in a block device or file with start/end offsets to make it less obvious (I know it's not a good option due to entropy and access mappings, that's not the point here)

Last use case is more of a hack inspired by first and second use cases, which are actual problems I encountered.

I found a few related questions, like those :

But the (valid) answers to these questions are often to dd partition or recreate MBR which is not an option here.

Improve this question

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
3

There's a comment under this already linked question:

I found an answer which is using losetup with -o and --sizelimit options.

Also modern mount can do this. About loop devices in man mount:

This type of mount knows about four options, namely loop, offset, sizelimit and encryption, that are really options to losetup.

So the syntax is like:

mount -o offset=OFFSET,other,options,here /image/file /mnt/foo

where OFFSET is in bytes. One usually knows the offset in 512-byte sectors. If starting sector is e.g. 2048 then this is useful:

mount -o offset=$((512*2048)),other,options,here /image/file /mnt/foo

In practice you hardly ever need sizelimit with mount because the filesystem you mount knows its own size.

Improve this answer
1

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .