How to mount an LVM volume from a dd/raw/vmdk image?

Input: RAW/DD Image of an HDD. fdisk -l shows partitions

fdisk -l image.dd
Disk image.dd: 15 GiB, 16106127360 bytes, 31457280 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x00093f57
Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
image-1.dd1 * 2048 499711 497664 243M 83 Linux
image-1.dd2 501758 31455231 30953474 14.8G 5 Extended
image-1.dd5 501760 31455231 30953472 14.8G 8e Linux LVM

Trying to mount it using start-sector*sector size (as described here; common for mounting partitions) brings error

(„mount: /mnt/vmdisk: unknown filesystem type 'LVM2_member'.“

The most sufficent solutions can be found here using lvm2 tools like vgscan, vgchange, lvs; but these tools does not have an option to scan in a raw file for these volumes.

So how would it be possible to access the content of the Linux LVM using mount or something similar?

1 Answer

Install kpartx

sudo apt-get install kpartx

Integrate the volumes in dev/mapper using

sudo kpartx -a -v image.dd

Check dev/mapper to see your partitions

administrator@cdc-ansible:~$ ls -l /dev/mapper/
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 Nov 19 12:50 123--yourname--ewu--vg-root -> ../dm-3
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 Nov 19 12:50 123--yourname--ewu--vg-swap_1 -> ../dm-4
crw------- 1 root root 10, 236 Nov 19 07:59 control
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 Nov 19 12:50 loop2p1 -> ../dm-0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 Nov 19 12:50 loop2p2 -> ../dm-1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 Nov 19 12:50 loop2p5 -> ../dm-2

Afterwards sudo lvscanto find the name of the lv's:

sudo lvscan ACTIVE '/dev/123--yourname--ewu--vg/root' [12.71 GiB] inherit ACTIVE '/dev/123--yourname--ewu--vg/swap_1' [<2.00 GiB] inherit

Try to mount it again:

sudo mount /dev/123--yourname--ewu--vg/root /mnt/rootfs 

The mounted file system (tada!):

ll /mnt/rootfs/
total 116
drwxr-xr-x 22 root root 4096 Oct 30 09:37 ./
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Nov 19 12:59 ../
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Oct 30 09:35 bin/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Sep 28 2015 boot/
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Sep 28 2015 dev/
drwxr-xr-x 102 root root 12288 Oct 30 09:37 etc/
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Nov 11 2016 home/
drwxr-xr-x 22 root root 4096 Nov 24 2017 lib/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Feb 2 2018 lib64/
drwx------ 2 root root 16384 Sep 28 2015 lost+found/
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Sep 28 2015 media/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 24 2017 mnt/
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Aug 26 2016 opt/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Apr 10 2014 proc/
drwx------ 7 root root 4096 Oct 9 10:08 root/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Sep 28 2015 run/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 12288 Oct 30 09:35 sbin/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jul 22 2014 srv/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Mar 13 2014 sys/
drwxrwxrwt 8 root root 4096 Oct 30 09:43 tmp/
drwxr-xr-x 10 root root 4096 Sep 28 2015 usr/
drwxr-xr-x 12 root root 4096 Sep 28 2015 var/
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 30 Oct 30 09:36 vmlinuz -> boot/vmlinuz-4.4.0-137-generic

Thanks to these sources 1 2 3

And by the way, if you are coming from another image type (such as VMDK,VDI,...) use this link to convert it to DD.