Using ddrescue with an entire disk

Saturday June 07, 2008 at 11:08 AM

Earlier this week we quickly ran ddrescue on a few 40GB disks, copying them to large .img files on another drive. We accidentally saved the entire disk /dev/hda instead of the individual partitions, and of course mount isn’t smart enough to read the partition tables embedded in the .img files.

One solution would be to dd the .img back to a physical disk and let the system read the partitions. After some digging around, some friends stumbled on using lomount from the Xen tools package:

losetup /dev/loop0 /path/to/backuphda.img
lomount -diskimage /dev/loop0 -partition 3 /mnt/yayitworks/

It would be nice if something like this was mentioned with the ddrescue documentation, because I’m sure plenty of people have run into this problem.