Friday 23 October 2015

Mounting a NTFS partition saved as iso file

Simple as that, ntfs-3g does the magic:

root@ubuntu:/home/partimag/2015-10-22-15-img# ntfs-3g sda4.iso /dir-to-mount-location/

This example is somehow correlated with http://cybersec-linuxhorizon.blogspot.ro/2015/10/partclone-v0273-bug.html

Do not try to mount as loop (mount -o loop) because is not working...


Partclone (v0.2.73) bug

Restoring a Clonezilla partition backup using partclone v0.2.73 could fail as follow:

root@ubuntu:/home/partimag/2015-10-22-15-img# cat /home/partimage/sda4.ntfs-ptcl-img.gz.aa | gzip -d -c | partclone.restore -C -s - -O /home/partimage/sda4.iso
Partclone v0.2.73 http://partclone.org
Starting to restore image (-) to device (sda4.iso)
device (sda4.iso) is mounted at
error exit
Partclone fail, please check /var/log/partclone.log !


Digging a little bit, I found that the reason is very simple and I do not know if I can call it a bug or not.

Pure and simple, before running the restoring command you should create the iso file. In my example, you should create the sda4.iso file and the simple way is:

root@ubuntu:/home/partimag/2015-10-22-15-img#touch sda4.iso

I'm pretty sure that other partclone versions have the same issue...

I must say that Clonezilla distribution is a very useful tool for disk and/or partition cloning/restoring. Partclone is included in the Clonezilla distribution.

If your recovered partition is NTFS and want to mount it, use ntfs-3g as here: http://cybersec-linuxhorizon.blogspot.ro/2015/10/mounting-ntfs-partition-saved-as-iso.html