Neil Brown wrote:

On Saturday December 23, davidsen@tmr.com wrote:
  

quoted

I hope I can use the md code to solve a problem, although in a way 
probably not envisioned by the author(s).

I have a disk image, a physical dump of every sector from start to 
finish, including the partition table. What I hope I can do is to create 
a one drive RAID-1 partitionable array, and then access it with fdisk or 
similar. These partitions are not "nice" types such as FAT, VFAT, ext2, 
etc, this is an odd disk, and I "saved it" by saving everything. Now I'd 
like to start dismembering the information and putting it into useful 
pieces. I even dare to hope that I could get the original software 
running on a virtual machine at some point.

The other alternative is to loopback mount it, I'm somewhat reluctant to 
do that if I can avoid it.

Yes, the partition table is standard in format if not in content.
    

Maybe...
Is this image in a file?
md only works with block devices, so you would need to use the 'loop'
driver to create a block-device "/dev/loopX".
  

I was thinking nbd, actually.

But as loop devices cannot be partitioned, you could then
  mdadm -Bf /dev/md/d9 -amdp8 -l1 -f -n1 /dev/loopX
  
and then look at the partitions in /dev/md/d9_*

Should work.

Sounds worth a try. Will be a learning experience if nothing else.

-- 
bill davidsen [off-list ref]
  CTO TMR Associates, Inc
  Doing interesting things with small computers since 1979