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My Linode instance is corrupted after I did an inline upgrade of Ubuntu from 14 LTS to 16 LTS. After trying relentlessly for over one week, I decided to extract the data from one of my backups and create a new Linode instance.

I followed this article: https://www.linode.com/docs/products/compute/compute-instances/guides/copy-a-disk-image-over-ssh/#copy-and-download-the-disk and successfully created a Linode image of the /dev/sda/ disk but now I am unable to open it locally.

As per the article, the command mount -o loop linode.img linode_dsk should help me mounting the disk in the specified directory i.e. linode_dsk but I am getting the following error: mount: You must specify a filesystem type with -t.

When I do specify the filetype: sudo mount -t ext4 -o loop linode.img linode_dsk, I get the following error:

mount: exec /Library/Filesystems/ext4.fs/Contents/Resources/mount_ext4 for /Users/<username>/Documents/Linode/linode1: No such file or directory
mount: /Users/<username>/Documents/Linode/linode_dsk failed with 72

Not sure what's going on here but I would really appreciate any pointers in the right direction.

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The command you have found is for Linux - you cannot use that command on macOS, which is a completely different operating system. There's multiple problems with it:

First, your command specifies to mount a file system of the type "ext4". That "ext" (extended) family of file systems was created specifically for Linux, and is mainly used there. It is not supported by macOS. You will need to install third party file system software in order to mount an ext4 file system on macOS.

Third party options are mainly Paragon's extFS for Mac or the open-source ext4fuse package.

Second, your command specifies the loop option, which means to use an image file as the backend for a /dev/loopX device that serves as a "virtual disk". This is a Linux-specific option, as /dev/loop is a "Linux-thing". On macOS you would instead use hdiutil and its attach command to create a block device backed by an image file.

In the interest of following the tutorial guide, you have found, you can simply skip the mount step and simply skip validating/verifying that the image contains the right things. That will be revealed anyways later when you upload the image.

Other options (besides the third party ext4 software and hdiutil) include:

  1. Use virtualisation to run Linux on your Mac. Now you can use the commands from the guide directly.

  2. Upload the image to a Linux server and use the commands from the guide directly.

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  • Thanks for your response. It's really helpful. Would you be kind enough to update your answer with some examples of trustworthy third party system software so that I can mark your answer as accepted? Also, you would need some formatting around hdiutil.
    – mansoor.khan
    May 2 at 13:43
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    @mansoor.khan I have added links to third party software now so you can mark it as accepted.
    – jksoegaard
    May 2 at 14:46
  • Thank you so much @jksoegaard
    – mansoor.khan
    May 2 at 18:04

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