#28 cmdline tool to extract partimage to hdimage

[Darryl Miles]

Would be nice to have a server side comand line tool
that can extract PartImage volume files into a single
large raw Hard Drive Image file, using Large File
Support (>2Gb) and sparse writes (seek() -> write(),
seek() -> write()).

"Hard Drive Image" file format is nothing special, this
is a raw sector dump of the original partition into one
large file that. A bit like doing:

dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/tmp/myHda1.hdimg

[Tomasz Ostrowski]

Logged In: YES
user_id=352834

At least there should be an option to restore to file which
is not a device. Now it is not possible - the following
message will be shown:
The second argument [[filename]] must be a valid device (ex:
/dev/hda1).

This feature would be very useful when only a few files are
needed from image file and there's no free partition
available to restore the image. It would be possible to
restore to "hard drive image", mount with a "loop" option
and access the files.

[Tomasz Ostrowski]

Logged In: YES
user_id=352834

I've found a workaround but a little bit complex. The
following works on Linux:

1. Create sparse file of partition size (or more), like this:
# dd if=/dev/zero of=looppartition bs=1M count=[size_in_bytes]

2. Check and for first free loop device:
# losetup -f
/dev/loop0

3. Setup this free loop device to use the file you created
in step 1:
# losetup /dev/loop0 looppartition

4. Restore the image to /dev/loop0:
# partimage restore /dev/loop0 backup.partimage

5. Remove loop device setup:
# losetup -d /dev/loop0

6. Mount image file with a "loop" option:
# mount looppartition /mnt -o loop