Hi All,

I would like to be able to create, partition, format, mount, and populate a disk image file as a non-root user. I am able to create the raw image file with dd and partition it with parted as a non-root user. However, I have not found a way to format, mount, and populate it as a non-root user. There are some great tools like losetup and kpartx which are perfect for the job except they must be run as root.

Surely there must be a way to do this as non-root. Does anyone know of a way using fuse, qemu, or a similar tool?

Thanks

The following might be useful: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/QEMU/Images

Have admin create a new user with only those permissions maybe. Use it when you do these tasks and return to standard user when finished.

A disk-image file is, of course, "just a file," even though it has an internal structure that corresponds to ... perhaps in a compressed sort of way ... the block-structure of a hard drive. (It also has various data integrity check features.) Utilities to manage these files are "an easy Google search away," and they do not require root privileges.

My particular challenge is that I need to be able to create and populate one ext partition and one vfat partition within the same image. I have found the genext2fs utility which can create an image with an ext partition as non-root. There are also the mtools which can copy files into a fat partition image as non-root. However, I don't currently have a way to combine the two into one image.