[openpsion] A linux question...disk mounting

[Brian D. <du...@ap...>]

I have a general linux question that has troubled me for some
time.  After googling to no success, I thought I would put it
to the openpsion mailing list.

The problem is this:

I have made an image of a compactflash disk to a file by:
dd if=/dev/sda of=afilename

Now /dev/sda, the compactflash disk, has been formatted to have
a couple of partitions, /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2.  afilename is 
just a file that is the same size as the compactflash card.

The question is how to mount the partitions within afilename so
that I can get to them.  Normally one does "dd if=/dev/sda1 of=foo",
which can then be mounted as, e.g., "mount -o loop foo /mnt/disk".
With a file of a raw, multipartioned disk, I am at a loss as to how to 
mount the partitions within the file.

Interestingly, you can "fdisk afilename", and it will report back
the partitions o.k.

dd if=/dev/sda of=afilename
is obviously the fastest way to back up the complete contents of a CF
disk.  But if I can't get to the partitions in the file...

With an actual CF disk, /dev/sdb, say, of equal or larger size to the 
original /dev/sda, the contents of the original disk can be restored 
by "dd if=afilename of=/dev/sdb".  But it would be nice to be able
to mount the partitions within the file, without a physical CF card!

Anybody have an answer?

B.D.