[lug] Convertion of ext4 Sparse Files

[Aaron D. Johnson]

stimits at comcast.net writes:
> > Search on Android sparse image. I found all kinds of tools
> > referenced online.
> 
> In order for reading a sparse file to result in the bytes of a
> non-sparse file the reader or the driver of the file system must
> recognize this as such...apparently this version is recognized as
> an Android sparse image when the "file" command is run on it, but no
> other tool...even some of those specific to Android ...seems to work
> on this.  I'm trying to get more information from the creator of the
> tool which created the sparse file.

Your "Android sparse image" file is something different than a sparse
file on a UNIXy filesystem like ext4.  This is unfortunately very
confusing for those of us trying to help out -- we saw "ext4 sparse
file" in your subject line and went off trying to understand how that
might cause the problems you're experiencing.

At this point, you are correct -- the tool which created the Android
image file (sparse or otherwise) has left you with something that
needs to be extracted if you'd like to access using a more "normal"
(by which I mean desktop or server-ish) Linux system.  I would hope
the image creator tool's author is capable of explaining how to
extract the image file's contents.

Please let us know if you can get anywhere on that front.  If not,
perhaps you can share the image file itself somewhere and others can
see what it might take to make use of it.

- Aaron