Jan Kundrát wrote:
> Troy Dawson wrote:
>> Unless there is something critical that most people use, we usually 
>> let RedHat deal with it and push out the fix.  Since they say they 
>> have already fixed it, and it will come out in the next release, 
>> expect the fix in SL 5.3.
> 
> OK; considering that nobody complained so far and that I'm happy with my 
> fix, this sounds reasonable.
> 
>> Just out of curiosity, what are you really doing with this?  When you 
>> say you are "extrating partitions", that doesn't mean anything to me.
>> I can mount my virtual partitions using lomount, and get files off 
>> them.  Or I can repartition the disk in my virtual machine.
>> I've read the man page and the information about kpartx, but I guess I 
>> just don't know when I would use this.  What specific thing do you use 
>> this for?
> 
> A disk image created by virt-install contains the image of a whole disk 
> (like /dev/sda), not just a partition with the filesystem (like 
> /dev/sda1) -- there are some other data like partition table and 
> optionally more partitions.
> 
> While you *might* get access to the first partition using simple `mount 
> -o loop /path/to/image /target`, there were some cases where that failed 
> for me, IIRC.
> 

I wasn't able to do that with mount, but I was with lomount (it's in the xen rpm)
First I ran fdisk on the file
   fdisk -l /path/disk.img
Then I used lomount to mount the partition I wanted
   lomount -t ext3 -diskimage /path/disk.img -partition 1 /mnt/tmp/

And then I was able to get the file off that I needed.
Oh, but don't do this on a running virtual machine, I don't know what it would 
do, but I believe it would be bad.

> Using kpartx, one can setup a special block devices which give access to 
> just the "partitions" from the disk image. One can consider this kpartx 
> to an alternative to what kernel normally does when it creates 
> /dev/sda{1,2,3} from /dev/sda.
> 
> Cheers,
> -jkt

Thanks for letting me know what you do with kpartx.  I hadn't heard of it until 
I saw your e-mail.
Troy

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Troy Dawson  [log in to unmask]  (630)840-6468
Fermilab  ComputingDivision/LCSI/CSI DSS Group
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