Mount entire drive dd image
It is a pretty common practice to use the command dd to make backup images of drives and partitions. It’s as simple as the command:
dd if=[input] of=[output]
A while back I did just that and made a dd backup of not just a partition but of an entire hard drive. This was very simple (I just used if=/dev/sda instead of something like if=/dev/sda2). The problem came when I tried to mount this image.