Debian and .disk file compatibility

_person_ · 12-18-2010, 02:32 PM

Heya, first post here.

Well, yesterday I removed my Ubuntu install and decided to replace it with Debian. I backed up the /home directory onto the Windoze installation on the other hard drive. That was a "home.disk" file. Now, I copied the file over to the Debian hard drive, and can't figure out how to recover the files. Is this possible to do in Debian?

fbsduser · 12-18-2010, 03:21 PM

What did you use to make the backup disk image?
If you used the dd command, you'll need to mount the disk image from the console using the mount command, you need to pass the "-o loop" to the mount command and you use the filesystem that you were using in your ubuntu "/" partition.

_person_ · 12-18-2010, 03:56 PM

It's not a disk image really, it's just a *.disk file. I tried "mount -o loop /home/backup.disk" with no success, so I assume that's not what I was supposed to do.

fbsduser · 12-18-2010, 05:38 PM

Did you do

Code:

sudo mount -t ext4 -o loop /home/backup.disk /mnt

(assuming your ubuntu's "/" partition was set using the default ext4 filesystem).
Also note that a disk image IS a file that is treated as a whole volume by the OS (hence why you use the "-o loop" flag when mounting).
Now if you used a special program to make the backup, you will probably need it to restore the backup.

raokat · 12-18-2010, 06:07 PM

Can anybody point me to a resource where I can read a little more on this. Thank you.

_person_ · 12-18-2010, 06:09 PM

That works a bit better. Unfortunately, the partition was fat32 for some reason. When I try "sudo mount -t fat32 -o loop /home/backup.disk /mnt", it says that fat32 is an unknown FS type. Is it still possible to read the file?

jschiwal · 12-18-2010, 07:39 PM

Make sure the vfat kernel module is loaded:
lsmod | grep vfat

If it isn't "sudo modprobe vfat"

To mount the image file use "sudo mount -t vfat -o loop /home/backup.disk /mnt"

_person_ · 12-18-2010, 08:15 PM

Quote:

lsmod | grep vfat
vfat 9152 0
fat 40864 1 vfat
nls_base 6820 2 vfat,fat

Quote:

mount -t vfat -o loop /home/backup.disk /mnt
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/loop0,
missing codepage or helper program, or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so

Quote:

dmesg | tail
[ 21.671668] lp0: using parport0 (interrupt-driven).
[ 21.716352] ppdev: user-space parallel port driver
[ 31.644039] eth0: no IPv6 routers present
[ 100.916014] eth0: no IPv6 routers present
[ 673.696455] FAT: bogus number of reserved sectors
[ 673.696471] VFS: Can't find a valid FAT filesystem on dev loop0.
[ 4717.831893] FAT: bogus number of reserved sectors
[ 4717.831905] VFS: Can't find a valid FAT filesystem on dev loop0.
[ 4740.757677] FAT: bogus number of reserved sectors
[ 4740.757690] VFS: Can't find a valid FAT filesystem on dev loop0.

That resulted after the above suggestion.

fbsduser · 12-18-2010, 08:24 PM

That is because your disk image isn't fat32.

_person_ · 12-18-2010, 08:31 PM

Then I can't remember what it might be. I get those results with NTFS, ext2, ext3, and vfat. What else might it be?

fbsduser · 12-18-2010, 09:13 PM

Ext4, reiserfs or btrfs (which are the most commonly used in ubuntu).

_person_ · 12-18-2010, 09:17 PM

Reiser gives the same thing, ext4 and btrfs give "mount: unknown filesystem type 'btrfs'" and "mount: unknown filesystem type 'ext4'"

Is there a way to scan it and see which it is?

Kenny_Strawn · 12-18-2010, 11:21 PM

Have you tried mounting it in Nautilus (if you have GNOME) or Dolphin (if you have KDE)? Usually in GNOME there's a utility called "Archive Mounter" that you can use to mount images (just right-click them).

Then, after mounting it that way, this might help:

Code:

sudo fdisk -l #lowercase 'L', not number 1

_person_ · 12-18-2010, 11:37 PM

When I right-click the backup.disk file in the file manager, my options are to open it with "Archive Manager", "mount", or other applications. Opening with mount appears to do nothing, the archive manager just tells me that it can't open the file.

fdisk -l doesn't help either, it just lists the info for the partitions on the two hard drives, nothing about the backup.disk file.

fbsduser · 12-19-2010, 05:46 PM

you need to do

Code:

sudo fdisk -l backup.disk

to make fdisk look inside the disk image.