Mounting and recovering HDD from img

Question

I’ve managed to use ddrescue to create an img file of my dead HDD. 690GB. How can I now attempt to recover data from the .img in Linux?

Is there a way to mount it or some tools that auto recover data from it?

Answer 1

You can easily convert the image into a block device which will act like a raw hard drive by using the following commands:

losetup loop0 /path/to/imagefile.img

This will create a device "/dev/loop0" which is equivalent to /dev/sda. You can then use

kpartx -a /dev/loop0 

To create partitions which existed on the drive - note that the partitions will exist in /dev/mapper/loop0pX rather then /dev/loop0

If these are regular partitions you can then mount them with the regular mount command like mount /dev/mapper/loop0p1 /path/to/mount - or you can activate LVM using the appropriate LVM commands etc.

Answer 2

there are several ways to recover data from an img-file:

---

The Sleuth Kit

with The Sleuth Kit you can recover/extract files from an img-file directly.

1. install it by opening a terminal and insert (assuming you are using a debian-derivate):
   sudo apt update && sudo apt install sleuthkit
2. extracting files and saving them in a choosen folder:
   tsk_recover -a path/to/ddrescue.img /path/to/folder/for/recovered/files

tsk_recover has some other useful options, so i would advise to read its man-page.

---

kpartx

with kpartx you can mount the img-file and cherry-pick the needed files with your preferred file-manager, which maybe will need much less space and time if you just need a few files.

1. install it by opening a terminal and insert (assuming you are using a debian-derivate):
   sudo apt update && sudo apt install kpartx
2. mounting all partitions present in the img-file:
   sudo kpartx -a path/to/ddrescue.img
3. unmounting all partitions present in the img-file:
   sudo kpartx -d path/to/ddrescue.img

---

mount

(for this case) pretty the same as with kpartx can be achieved with mount.

1. mounting all partitions present in the img-file:
   sudo mount -o loop path/to/ddrescue.img /media/loop_mount
2. unmounting all partitions present in the img-file:
   sudo umount /media/loop_mount