[fuse-devel] Re: treating partitioned files as disks

[Eric S. J. <es...@ha...>]

Joshua J. Berry wrote:
> On Sunday 31 July 2005 15:59, Eric S. Johansson wrote:
> 
>>I am looking for some way to treat a file as if it were a block device
>>so I could format, impose filesystem, and then mount it so I can copy
>>all of the files in place and hit it with grub to make it bootable.
> 
> 
> mount -o loop

only works if the file has a single partition and as a filesystem.

> 
> (or, if you want a plain block device, losetup)

kind of sort of works.  Can only partition consistently with fdisk and 
not sfdisk.  the latter is required if you are attempting to write a 
script to partition a file as a disc.  The biggest problem obviously is 
that a file does not have sectors, heads, cylinders.

>>Is this something fuse can do easily?  Already?  I think this technique
>>would also be useful in producing partitioned CD-ROM images.
> 
> 
> FUSE doesn't do anything with raw block devices.  You probably want the 
> loopback device (/dev/loopX).

it's beginning to sound like I really need a loopback device that 
actually handles different partitions in the same way that hda can 
handle multiple partitions (hda1, hda2, ...) and can impose h/s/c 
semantics on a file.

Thanks.  Appreciate the help.

---eric