Supeblock access from user space

[Nils Kassube]

MirJafar Ali wrote:
> Thanks for a positive reply. I am not sure about how virtual machine
>  works, but

I think, [1] is a useful starting point to find out what a virtual 
machine is.

> since we are not allowed to reboot the departmental machines, can I
>  still use
> Xen/VMware to start Ubuntu. I am not sure, so please forgive me for
>  my ignorance
> in this field.

There is no need to reboot the real machine if you use Virtualbox (I 
can't speak for other virtualization software). However your admin would 
have to install Virtualbox on your machine. Then you would install 
Ubuntu from the ISO file of the Ubuntu live CD. You would install it to 
a virtual disk which is a single very large file (at least 4GB) on the 
real hard disk. As the virtual disk is only a large file it may be owned 
by you and you don't need direct disk access on the real machine. But on 
the virtual machine you are the main user who has root access. Then you 
can analyze the file system within the virtual disk. And if you reboot 
the virtual machine you don't reboot the real machine.


Nils

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_machine>