How to read/mount a .gz.dd image file?

I have a partition file (a .gz.dd file) that I need to read the files from. I'm new to Linux and I don't know how I can read/mount .dd files in Ubuntu. Would you guys tell me the procedure of reading the file? Thanks.

2 Answers

If you want to read the files on-the-fly from your (gzip) compressed filesystem without having to unpack it, use mksquasfs and dd to create it in the first place.

You can also choose the compression with the -comp option of mksquashfs, e.g. gzip, lzo, xz etc.

See this answer on how to do it (backup/create image, mount one partition of a whole diskimage with the help of kpartx, etc.).

Are you sure it's not a .dd.gz file?

Here's how you uncompress a gzipped file:

gunzip example.dd.gz

This should create a file named example.dd in your current working directory.

To mount a dd image file, create a directory, and mount the image to that directory:

$ mkdir exampledir/
$ mount -o loop example.dd exampledir/

You may need to specify more options to the mount command depending on what type of image your file is.

You can now view the files inside the image by browsing exampledir/.