[svlug] mounting a partition in the middle of a device dumped to

[Robert Hajime Lanning]

---- As written by Tim:
> 
> You can specify an offset into the file using losetup, but I don't know
> if it will work properly.
> 
> A friend of mine used losetup to specify an offset to mount a FAT16
> partition inside of a VMWare Virtual Disk. It appeared to work
> correctly, and he was able to create files to the root directory, but
> trying to create files in subdirectories would corrupt the file system.
> I don't know if the same would happen with a FAT32 or ext2 partition
> inside of a dd'ed disk.
> 

The issue with VMWare virtual disks, is that the only blocks that realy
exist in the file are those that are (or have been) actualy written to.
Hence, your VMWare disk file does not start out as the actual size of the
virtual disk.

VMWare (for version 2.x, atleast) had a perl script that handled the
interface to the virtual disk.

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