How to mount a partition by specifying block range instead of partition on Linux?

Dear Linux super users,

I'd like to mount a filesystem that whose range I would like to ommit from the partition table in order to hide it from anyone looking for data on my disk.

This capability together with volatile/non-fstab mounts and dm-crypt plain would make my data very secure from people who are interested in my data or the possibility of data being there at all.

Is this possible with mount(8)?

1 Answer

It is possible with non-encrypted filesystem. E.g if your partition starts at the sector 34607104 and the sector size is 512, you go with:

mount -o offset=$((512*34607104)) /dev/sdX /mnt/foo/

The partition table entry may not exist, it doesn't matter. mount will examine the filesystem and do its job (you can help with -t switch).

I don't know much about dm-crypt plain but it appears you should decrypt the device (partition) first, then mount. Michael Kjörling's comment is useful:

You want losetup and particularly its --offset and --sizelimit switches. Once you have a loopback device configured, you should be able to mount it normally.

I would change the last words to "decrypt it normally" to fit your needs.

There is also dmsetup tool. It allows you to create a mapped device from chunks of various files/devices. E.g. you can hide your encrypted "partition" in several gaps between normal partitions inside one or more HDDs. Read my answer to another question and study man dmsetup. Make your /dev/mapper/barbaz franken-partition and have fun with plain encryption on it.

Hint: in the said answer I use losetup to create devices from files because dmsetup doesn't work with regular files. You will work with already existing devices. Use their /dev/something paths when building the map for dmsetup – no need for losetup in this case.