In my previous
post I went
over two ways to mount a partition within a disk image file. There is
actually another easy way to do this by utilizing some of the tools that
the virt community has provided us in recent years.
libguestfs is a fairly comprehensive library
for manipulating guest disk images and filesystems. It turns out that
the tools work pretty well even for disk images that aren’t specific to
any virtualized guest; after all a disk image is a disk image.
The guestmount utility is provided as part of the libguestfs-tools-c
package in Fedora 17 and allows us the ability to (in)directly mount the
second partition of our disk image. This is shown below:
\
dustymabe@media: > guestmount -a /mnt/lenovo.img -m /dev/sda2 --ro /tmp/mnt
dustymabe@media: > ls /tmp/mnt/Users/
All Users Default Default User desktop.ini dustymabe Public
The only drawback I can see at this point from using this tool is that
it is using fuse under the covers to
mount the filesystem. This has some advantages and disadvantages but
typically results in lower performance. Nevertheless, guestmount and
the other tools provided by libguestfs are no doubt becoming very
useful for manipulating disk images.
Cheers!
Dusty Mabe