Preparation of your data

This text is WIP!

Sector Image Files of Hard Disks

We assume you already have made a copy of a complete physical hard disk containing several partitions, e.g. pc4_disk01_hd10.dd.

First we need to find the offsets to mount single partitions of interest.

The fdisk command can also be applied to files:

# fdisk -u -l pc4_disk01_hd10.dd
You must set cylinders.
You can do this from the extra functions menu.

Disk pc4_disk01_hd10.dd: 0 MB, 0 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 0 cylinders, total 0 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00021897

			 Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
pc4_disk01_hd10.dd1   *          63      112454       56196   83  Linux
pc4_disk01_hd10.dd2          112455     1124549      506047+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
pc4_disk01_hd10.dd3         1124550   312576704   155726077+  83  Linux
Partition 3 has different physical/logical endings:
	 phys=(1023, 254, 63) logical=(19456, 254, 63)

Simply multiply the starting sector with the size of a sector in bytes

# echo $((1124550*512))
575769600

and use the result as in

# mount -o ro,loop,offset=575769600 pc4_disk01_hd10.dd /mnt

This should give you a valid file hierarchy below /mnt. If mount complaints about a missing file system type, the offset is most probably wrong.

If manual mounting goes well, insert a new row into the session table of your database and fill in all necessary information – most importantly a unique sessionid, datapath which points to your image file and the correct mount command.

Recent versions of Indexer will do a temporary mount by itself and do not need pre-mounted file systems anymore.

Sector Image Files of Floppy Disks

Simply do not specify an offset in your mount command.

.iso Files of Optical Disks

Simply do not specify an offset in your mount command.

A Folder full of Files

If you want to recursively process a folder full of files (and not an image file) simply point datapath to that folder and leave the mount column empty.