Mount an ISO image on a Solaris filesystem with lofiadm

Contributed by Rex

November 5, 2003

Tagged: Solaris system administration

Many software packages can be downloaded in the form of an ISO image. Rather than burning the image to a CD-ROM to access its contents, it is easy to mount the image directly into the filesystem using the lofiadm and mount commands.

Given an ISO image in /export/temp/software.iso, a loopback file device (/dev/lofi/1) is created with the following command:

lofiadm -a /export/temp/software.iso /dev/lofi/1

The lofi device creates a block device version of a file. This block device can be mounted to /mnt with the following command:

mount -F hsfs -o ro /dev/lofi/1 /mnt

These commands can be combined into a single command:

mount -F hsfs -o ro `lofiadm -a /export/temp/software.iso` /mnt

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guest 4 years ago 1 point
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Way cool example. This really helped me.

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SolarisSmurf 2 years ago 1 point
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---------------- mount_iso ---------------------

#!/bin/sh
#
# Mount an ISO image using a loopback filesystem.
#

if [ -z "$1" -o -z "$2" ]; then
echo "$0 <full_path_to_iso> <mount_point>"
exit 0
fi

# Add the loopback block device.
# This will return the device path under /dev/lofi/.
printf "Creating loopback device to $1 ... "
LOFS_DEVICE=`lofiadm -a "$1"`
if [ 0 -ne $? ]; then
exit 1
else
echo "${LOFS_DEVICE}"
fi

# Now, mount the device to the mount point specified.
printf "Mounting $2 on ${LOFS_DEVICE} ... "
mount -F hsfs -o ro "${LOFS_DEVICE}" "$2"
if [ 0 -ne $? ]; then
lofiadm -d ${LOFS_DEVICE}
exit 1
else
echo "mounted"
fi

-------------------- umount_iso ---------------------------

#!/bin/sh
#
# Unmount an ISO image mounted over the loopback file system.
#

if [ -z "$1" ]; then
echo "$0 <mount_point>"
exit 0
fi

# Find the loopback device in the list of mount points.
LOFS_DEVICE=`mount | grep "$1" | awk '{print $3}'`
if [ -z "${LOFS_DEVICE}" ]; then
echo "Unable to find loopback device for mount point $1"
exit 1
fi

# Unmount the mount point.
printf "Unmounting $1 on ${LOFS_DEVICE} ... "
umount $1
if [ 0 -ne $? ]; then
exit 1
else
echo "unmounted"
fi

# Delete the loopback block device.
printf "Deleting loopback device ${LOFS_DEVICE} ... "
lofiadm -d "${LOFS_DEVICE}"
if [ 0 -ne $? ]; then
exit 1;
else
echo "deleted"
fi

--------------------------------------

enjoy!!! w00h00!!!

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Anonymous 2 years ago 1 point
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Is it possible to mount DVD.iso ?

When I run lofiadm -a /cdrom/cdroot/bo651.iso /cdrom/fakedirectory

I get:

lofiadm: size of /cdrom/cdroot/bo651.iso is not a multiple of 512 :?:

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