mount gzipped hd image
 

I have made some backups of hd's using dd+gzip. First is it possible to
mount these images without first extracting them with gzip? If so How can I do this?

I don't think so. You have to mount some form of supported file system. You can mount a file that is an image of a disk if that file has been formatted in any of the supported formats. You do this by using a loop device. (/dev/loop0, /dev/loop1, ... /dev/loop7)

Example: If you have a disk image created with dd called dd.image you can mount this to /mnt using this command.
I don't believe that you can pipe that file through gunzip to preprocess it. I believe that you have to mount an unzipped image file.

Thanks for the reply stress_junkie,

Well I guess I'll need to make sure I have enough free space on my backup drive. Thanks for the info on mounting using a loop device
thats exactly what I needed to know.