[SOLVED] DD image of whole disk won't mount

ctkroeker · 01-13-2009, 10:47 AM

A Windows laptop has it's "FAT" partition table screwed up. So I dd'd it as an image to an external drive. Now, before I mess arround with restoring the laptop's partition table, I want to make sure I can acces my dd backup image. I have tried mounting it but no go.

Code:

sfdisk -l -uS sda.img

reports "cannot get geometry" and "sector 0 does not have an msdos signature" and unrecognized partition table type".
I'm using a Knoppix liveCD for this. Have tried most stuff on this site http://pronweb.de/node/15

Thanks in advance.

UPDATE: apparantly its a FAT partition...

Quakeboy02 · 01-13-2009, 11:40 AM

Did you try this?

Code:

# losetup /dev/loop0 sda.img
# fdisk -lu /dev/loop0

Personally, I would probably have tried mounting it as a loop device, first.

ctkroeker · 01-13-2009, 11:53 AM

Yep, tried losetup. I tried windows recovery on the laptop, doesn't recognize that windows is on it and fixmbr and all the other tools just don't help. Apparantly it's not the mbr or first boot sector that is the problem. it's more like the filesystem is corrupted or just plain inacsesible.

UPDATE: apparantly its a FAT partition...

CJS · 01-13-2009, 12:00 PM

You could run testdisk on the drive image to see if it can find your NTFS/FAT Windows partition, and if it can, it can rebuild the partition table for you. And if I remember correctly, you don't even need to mount the drive image as a loop device, you can simply do:

Code:

sudo testdisk sda.img

If you are using testdisk version 6.9 or greater, choose "No Log", select the drive image and "proceed", "Intel", "Analyze", "quick search", Y/N depending on if there are any Vista partitions on the drive, hit enter to continue, and select "Deeper Search" so it does a deeper search, which could take a while. It's the deeper search results that you are after if you want the best accuracy and chance of recovering the original partition(s). Once testdisk completes the deeper search and presents you with a list of partitions, select each one in turn, press "p" to get a directory listing, and any partitions that give you a directory listing are the ones you could recover. Good luck and let us know how it goes.

ctkroeker · 01-13-2009, 02:22 PM

Thanks CJS, I did a testdisk recovery from a Trinity Rescue CD and it fixed so it now boots XP after doing fixmbr on the XP cd. Thank you very much!