teh fear

Mounting a loop file that is a filesystem is no problem
losetup /dev/loop0 my_loop_image
mount /dev/loop my_mount_point

or
mount -o loop my_loop_image my_mount_point
BUT, what if my loop image has partitions?

Having started to play with xen on linux, I have begun to use loop filesystems (a filesystem embedded in a file) rather a lot.
Xen virtual servers are, fairly often, run from within a loop filesystem and generally start with a fairly small file (1GB is big for a normal file, but not when it is [...]