[geeks] SunOS disk image manipulations/reading

[JP Hindin]

Good afternoon to you all in these bizarre times,

I'll skip the long back story, which is both fascinating and utterly 
uninteresting at the same time, and skip to it - I have a couple of disk 
images made from Solaris9 disks from Sun Netra compactPCI boards that I 
need to be able to work with.

Normally I'm working on Linux machines (I can feel Mouse's glare) so those 
are the kinds of tools I'd be hoping for, but I can be... flexible.

Generally when *I* do this sort of thing I'll connect the Sun disk to a 
Linux machine, and walk through the partitions doing partition-level 
images,
 	dd if=/dev/sdX2 of=sunXYZ_home.img bs=1M
 	dd if=/dev/sdX3 of=sunXYZ_var.img bs=1M
Which I can then work with later, if necessary, with Linux's VFS loopback 
driver,
 	mount -oufstype=sun -tufs -oro -oloop ./sunXYZ_home.img /mnt
As well as making a whole-disk image should I need to blow it back onto a 
disk later.

The images I presently have, however, are only full raw disk images, 
inclusive of partition table. I'd rather not have to write them out to 
disks to read them back in. Logically I need to peel a partition off this 
image so that it can be mounted and data from it copied - but I'm not 
entirely sure how to do that.

At least, I _think_ I'm looking at this problem the right way. I would 
love some advice.

My thanks to all, and do take care of yourselves;

  - JP