Ubuntu
coreutils package

Mount a dd image backup of a RAID drive

Asked by Tyler Burton

I'm trying to help a friend recover a system of theirs. They were running a RAID1 (2 mirrored drives) and when I plugged one of the drives into my Ubuntu 10.04 system I was able to successfully copy their files for them. I also used dd to image the drive as I wanted a backup while I re-build their RAID array.

What I'm wondering is if it is possible to mount this image file? I've tried mount [image file] [dir] and mount [image file] [dir] -o loop. I've even tried using the -t ntfs option but no luck. It seems to be recognizing the image drive as a RAID partition even though when I physically plugged the drive into my computer it had no problems.

Any ideas on how I can mount this correctly?

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Tyler Burton
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actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#1

I suggest you educate your friend to make regular backups, this avoids the need for any of this messing around.

You can try:

sudo mkdir /media/iso
sudo mount -o loop /path/to/filename.iso /media/iso

Just change /path/to/filename.iso for the actual file, you can then browser the files from /mdia/iso folder.

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Tyler Burton (tylerburtonca) said : 		#2

As I mentioned above I tried that already. Here is what is printed in the terminal: mount: unknown filesystem type 'isw_raid_member'

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Ralph Corderoy (ralph-inputplus) said : 		#3

When you used dd to image the drive to this image file that you're trying to mount, what did you do? Did you image the whole drive, e.g. /dev/sdb, or a partition within it?

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Tyler Burton (tylerburtonca) said : 		#4

Ah! You're right I did the entire drive. No wonder it doesn't recognize the filesystem. Is there I way I can mount an entire drive like that in Linux?

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Tyler Burton (tylerburtonca) said : 		#5

I followed the posts on this forum thread and got it to work. Thanks for your help!

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1186993

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Ralph Corderoy (ralph-inputplus) said : 		#6

Yes, sfdisk -uS to list the partition table and then pass the right offset to the loop mount device is how I do it. Don't forget you can mount most filesystems read-only, ro, to avoid altering the archived image.