[clug] Reading partition tables via loopback

[Darren Freeman]

Dear all,

A problem that's been bugging me for ages, and I need to solve fairly
soon, goes as follows:

I have a hard disc image, obtained using dd. It gets burned to CD/DVD
before I reformat a drive and use for my own purposes. The original
owner knows their drive can be returned with its original contents.

I now wish to mount the image via loopback. Ordinarily, if I had an
image of just one partition, this would be easy. However I have an image
of a whole drive, with like 6 partitions.

How do I convince linux to treat a loopback device like a hard disc, and
probe for partitions? As in I have my image mounted as /dev/loop6 and
was hoping to see stuff like /dev/loop61 /dev/loop62 etc. with my
partitions. Unfortunately it didn't happen automagically, is there a way
to force/trick this to happen?

Any other ideas? Hopefully I don't need to parse the DOS partition table
and determine the offset into the partitions. This would work though
since losetup accepts an offset.

Have fun,
Darren