I have created an image of my Raspberry Pi SD-card using dd:

sudo dd if=/dev/sdf of=/home/myusername/raspberry-backup-2014-04-10.img

The SD-card includes two partitions (one vfat, one ext4) which are automatically mounted when I plug the card in.

My question: How can I mount these partitions from the .img file?

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More details:

$ fdisk -l raspberry-backup-2014-04-10.img
Disk raspberry-backup-2014-04-10.img: 3974 MB, 3974103040 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 483 cylinders, total 7761920 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: 0x000981cb Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
raspberry-backup-2014-04-10.img1 8192 122879 57344 c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
raspberry-backup-2014-04-10.img2 122880 7761919 3819520 83 Linux

6

4 Answers

To avoid the need to create separate images for each partition or installing a utility like kpartx, you can mount each partition individually by specifying an offset in the mount command.

First examine the partitions in the image file and determine the offset by using fdisk:

$ fdisk -u -l rpi_image280914
Disk rpi_image280914: 16.0 GB, 16012804096 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1946 cylinders, total 31275008 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: 0x000cdac7 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
rpi_image280914p1 * 2048 514047 256000 c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
rpi_image280914p2 540672 31242239 15350784 83 Linux

Take the Start sector of the partition you want and multiply that value by the Units size. So if you want the second partition you'll get 540672 * 512 = 276824064.

Now create a folder and mount the partition:

mkdir rpi_partition2
sudo mount -o loop,offset=276824064 rpi_image280914 rpi_partition2/

Once you are done doing what you want with the partition data:

sudo umount rpi_partition2/
rm -r rpi_partition2/

1

After some additonal testing I found the solution myself: kpartx

sudo kpartx -a raspberry-backup-2014-04-10.img

This command created /dev/mapper/loop0p1 and /dev/mapper/loop0p2. Afterwards these partitions can be mounted straight forward:

sudo mount -o rw -t ext4 /dev/mapper/loop0p2 mount_target/

1

if your goal is to explore or modify the content of a partition (file system), this command line will mount the file system of the sd card dump my_sdcard_dump.img into the directory mount_dir.

part_id=2; INFILE=my_sdcard_dump.img; MOUNTPT=mount_dir PARTITION=${part_id}; sudo mount "$INFILE" "$MOUNTPT" -o loop,offset=$[ `/sbin/sfdisk -d "$INFILE" | grep "start=" | head -n $PARTITION | tail -n1 | sed 's/.*start=[ ]*//' | sed 's/,.*//'` * 512 ]

1

Dealing with an image of a whole disk with multiple partitions is quite tricky. Linux was not designed to read a partition table out of a regular file, even when attached to a loopback device, so you must carefully identify the offsets of the partitions and pass them in to the mount command.

The preferable way would be to create separate images of each partition:

sudo dd if=/dev/sdf1 of=/home/myusername/raspberry-backup-sdf1-2014-04-10.img
sudo dd if=/dev/sdf2 of=/home/myusername/raspberry-backup-sdf2-2014-04-10.img

Now you can easily treat these files as if they were individual partitions on a disk, mounting them as you normally would a real disk partition, by mapping them to a loop device. A loop device, or loopback device, is a virtual device that provides a translation layer for Linux to treat a file as a block device (like a disk or partition).

The loop devices are typically /dev/loop0 through /dev/loop8. Identify an unused loop device with the losetup command:

$ sudo losetup /dev/loop0
loop: can't get info on device /dev/loop0: No such device or address

This response indicates an unassigned loop device. Now we can assign the loop device to one of our image files:

$ sudo losetup /dev/loop0 /home/myusername/raspberry-backup-sdf1-2014-04-10.img

Absence of output from this command indicates success. Now /dev/loop0 is for most purposes functionally equivalent to /dev/sdf1 of your SD card, and you can mount it as you normally would:

sudo mount -t vfat /dev/loop0 /media/sdimage-1

Repeat the process using another loop device to mount the other partition. When you're done, unmount the filesystems and unassign the loop devices:

sudo umount /dev/loop0
sudo losetup -d /dev/loop0

1

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