losetup and dd images

[HippieJoe]

Well, not specific to Gentoo...but the image set I am trying to mount are of a Gentoo drive. Never mind my win98 naming scheme that is only for example, there are also 20 files to the set. Well here we go:

I am trying to use losetup to associate a ddimage to a loop back device. this works fine when the ddimage is 1 large file. for example:

losetup /dev/loop0 /image/win98.dd

however, the problem is, my dd files are broken into 2gb chunks. yes i could cat them into one large dd file however I do not want to do that, nor do i have the disc space or time. So i was trying a combination of commands to see if I could get the loop back to associate with a series of image files. for example, with image files:

win98.dd.001 win98.dd.002 win98.dd.003:

losetup /dev/loop0 win98.dd.00*
(no good this drops me to the help screen because it doesn't see a valid file to associate.)

losetup /dev/loop0 | cat win98.dd.00*
(no good either)

---

How could I "trick" losetup to think the series of dd image files which is really a dd image of one drive is a single file to associate with. again, i want to avoid:

cat win98.dd.00* > win98.dd
losetup /dev/loop0 win98.dd

that works already but takes much time and diskspace. Thank again and any advice is much apreciated.

HippieJoe