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Not a Linux problem per se, but I had a 128GB image disk in a unknown .bin format which belongs to a proprietary application. The application only ran on Windows.
I tried a few things but nothing except Windows based programs seemed able to identify the partitions, while I could run it in Wine, it dealt with unimplementend functions. So after a bit of googling and probing the file, it turns out the format had just a 512 bytes as header which some Windows based software ignored. After including the single block offset, all the tools used in Linux started working flawlessly.
This is so arcane to me. Like, I more or less understand your high-level explanation, but then you gloss over "including the block offset" but how would one do that ??
Inspecting the file with a hex editor would give you lots of useful info in this case. If you know approximately what the data should look like, you can just see where the garbage (header) ends and the data starts. I've reverse engineered data files from an oscilloscope like this.
Well, in this scenario the image file had 512 bytes sections, each one is called a block. If you have a KiB (a kibibyte = 1024 bytes) it will occupy 2 blocks and so on...
Since this image file had a header with 512 bytes (i.e. a block) I could, in any of the relevant Linux mounting software (e.g.
mount,losetup), choose an offset adding to the starting block of a partition. The command would look like this:sudo mount -o loop,offset=$((header+partition)) img_file /mnt