Mounting Windows LDM partitions in Fedora Linux

I've been working on editing video from the Openwest 2013 conference and one of the videographers gave me a hard disk with video he had captured from his tape-based camcorder.

I connected the disk to my computer via a SATA-to-USB dock and waited for the familiar notification that a new USB device had been connected, but it never happened. I took a closer look at /var/log/messages to see what was going on. I could see the hard disk was being detected and was assigned a block device (/dev/sdk), but nothing beyond this.

I did a fdisk -l /dev/sdk on the disk and discovered it had GPT partitioning. So, I then ran parted on the device and discovered it had the following partitions.

Number  Start   End     Size    File system  Name                          Flags
 1      17.4kB  1066kB  1049kB               LDM metadata partition
 2      1066kB  134MB   133MB                Microsoft reserved partition  msftres
 3      134MB   750GB   750GB                LDM data partition

I had never seen anything like this before, so I did some searching online. I discovered LDM is essentially Windows' version of LVM. I found lots of forum messages with people discussing their difficulty accessing data stored on LDM partitions from Linux, but there was no clear solution.

So, I gave up on it for the moment.

The next day, I was telling my brother-in-law about it and did another search. This time, I came across this page which describes a command-line tool ldmtool that will create the necessary device-mapper device so the partition can be mounted via the mount command.

I did a yum search ldm on my Fedora box and found an available package called libldm which had the description "A tool to manage Windows dynamic disks." Sounds good to me. It included the ldmtool and now I'm off to the races!

After doing a sudo ldmtool create all, I could see a new device in the /dev/mapper directory.

Doing a sudo mount /dev/mapper/ldm_vol_blahblah /mnt/scratch mounted the partition in /mnt/scratch.

Not fun, but effective.