[dm-devel] Using the dm tools to create a writable "mirror" of a physical disk

Anders Andersson pipatron at gmail.com
Wed Feb 2 22:31:06 UTC 2011


Good evening! I was recently given the task of trying to salvage files
from a 1.5TB harddrive that was accidentally formatted and/or
repartitioned. Normally I would do a 1:1 copy of the whole drive to a
file and operate on that, but I simply do not have that much room this
time.

Ideally I would like to create a writable snapshot in the same way as
I do with my LVM volumes, storing the changes in a smaller file or in
another block device so that I can experiment freely without worrying
about destroying anything else on the drive. Is this possible
(probably) and easy (probably not?) with any device mapper tools? I'm
not really sure where I should begin looking, because dmsetup is
probably pretty low-level.

Thanks for any pointers and ideas.

// Anders




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