I was not smart, I admit.

To make a very low level backup of my laptop prior to upgrading it, I decided to create an iso of the harddisk; while it is doing this, but a bit too far to just cancel and start anew, so I cannot test it out right now I decided to post here.

What I did:
(don't ask why I did 4M as blocksize, call it lack of coffee)

of course, there are partitions on /dev/sda (there's a swap for example)

I may (am pretty damn sure I will) want to access the files within the iso, and that's where I wonder how to tackle that;

I'm thinking along the lines of setting up a loopback device (losetup) but I don't think that that will be enough to recognize the partitions. Any thoughts? (or just re-create an image of /dev/sda1 ?)

Not 100% sure this would work, but have your tried fuseiso to mount your iso?

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Mount the iso, then loop mount the partition(s) with offset should work.

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I have not, thanks for the idea; might explore that one, but have my doubts.

Truth be told: this is not a true iso image, as iso does not facilitate partitions; this is a raw image instead.

I thought up that I can make this into a virtual machine with kvm/qemu; But that's also an extra step I was not hoping to go. Some googling learned that there is something called lomount, which has a -partition parameter; I'll try mount -oloop,offset=32256 example I found somewhere else. What I am rtying to figure out is if there is a "standard" way, without installing new software that will "always" work (e.g.: when booted from cd)

One of the things I was thinking of, was tricking the system into accessing /dev/loop? as a real harddisk (/dev/sdc or so)

Going to mark this thread as solved; the write has completed and test confirms that I can access the raw image file with:
That suffices, the files are accessible in such a way that I can recover whatever I will have to recover. Thanks for thinking along ;-)