Tag: mount

Loopback monting huge gzipped file

This is basically a note to myself for future reference which I hope is interesting to others.

I just had to loopback mount a gzipped image file. I didn’t want, however, to unpack the file, because I am very short on disk space right now. Also, I didn’t care too much about processing power. I searched quite a bit until I found “avfs“.

AVFS is a system, which enables all programs to look inside archived or compressed files, or access remote files without recompiling the programs or changing the kernel.

At the moment it supports floppies, tar and gzip files, zip, bzip2, ar and rar files, ftp sessions, http, webdav, rsh/rcp, ssh/scp

muelli@xbox:/tmp$ avfsd -o allow_root ~/.avfs
muelli@xbox:/tmp$ cd  ~/.avfs/home/muelli/qemu
muelli@xbox:~/.avfs/home/muelli/qemu$ sudo losetup /dev/loop1 XP-4G.ntfs.dd.gz#
muelli@xbox:~/.avfs/home/muelli/qemu$ sudo mount /dev/loop1 -oro,noatime /home/muelli/empty/

Note that the filename I’m accessing is suffixed with a hash.

Mounting QEmu qcow2 Image using NBD

For some reason, I had to mount a QEmu qcow2 image in the host system. I googled around and found some post on the qemu-dev list. Also, the QEmu FAQ answers whether one can mount any QEmu image, but it’s not very verbose. So I went and tried and voila: It works 🙂


muelli@xbox:~$ qemu-nbd --read-only --partition=1  --snapshot  winxp.img &
muelli@xbox:~$ sudo nbd-client localhost 1024 /dev/nbd0
Negotiation: ..size = 31447206KB
bs=1024, sz=31447206
muelli@xbox:~$ sudo mount /dev/nbd0 -oloop  ~/empty/
muelli@xbox:~$ ls -l /home/muelli/empty/
total 1744981
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root         0 2009-03-13 18:35 AUTOEXEC.BAT
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root      4952 2008-04-14 09:00 bootfont.bin
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root       207 2009-03-13 18:27 boot.ini
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root         0 2009-03-13 18:35 CONFIG.SYS
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root      4096 2009-03-13 19:17 Dokumente und Einstellungen
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root         0 2009-03-13 22:02 Driver
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 536399872 2009-04-04 14:37 hiberfil.sys
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root         0 2009-03-13 18:35 IO.SYS
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root         0 2009-03-13 18:35 MSDOS.SYS
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root      4096 2009-03-13 22:29 nlite
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root     47564 2008-04-14 09:00 NTDETECT.COM
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root    251712 2008-04-14 09:00 ntldr
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 805306368 2009-04-04 14:37 pagefile.sys
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root         0 2009-03-13 19:03 Postinstall
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root      4096 2009-03-13 20:59 Programme
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root      4096 2009-03-13 19:06 System Volume Information
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root     32768 2009-04-04 14:40 WINXP
muelli@xbox:~$

It uses a technology I’ve never heard of: Network Block Device (NBD). Now I’m a bit smarter. And I hope you can make use of this information 🙂

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported
This work by Muelli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported.