Mounting an image that has no filesystem

[LumbergTech]

I am new to all of this, so understand if I say something incorrect it is purely ignorance and not laziness.

I have an image of a CF card that is zeroed out and then fdisked

I want to start with that image and then use genromfs to put a new image on that card.

I almost have it working, but the problem is that I cannot mount the zero/fdisked image.

I can burn that image to a card and mount that card, but i cannot mount the image itself.

It is a .dd file

I would like to mount the zeroed/partitioned image so that I can genromfs directly onto that mounted image and THEN burn it to a card

I cannot just zero out the card and partition it because we are using VMs and unfortunately are getting awful transfer rates which makes the process take forever.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Nothinman]

You can't mount something that doesn't exist. I believe what you want to do is have genromfs write to a normal file and then write that file to the CF card with dd, e.g. dd if=/tmp/image.dd of=/dev/sdcard.

 

[LumbergTech]

here is how I am attempting it based on your feedback

genromfs -f zeropartitiondisk -x zeropartitiondisk

the only other file in the directory is my software image file

does this sound like the correct idea?

 

[LumbergTech]

It almost works, my only problem I think is that i normally did genromfs -f /dev/sda1 (for partition 1)... but when i genrom to a file how can I target a partition that exits in a file?

 

[Nothinman]

It almost works, my only problem I think is that i normally did genromfs -f /dev/sda1 (for partition 1)... but when i genrom to a file how can I target a partition that exits in a file?

As long as the device is partitioned, you don't need to. You could do that in step two, e.g. dd if=genrom.dd of=/dev/sda1.