All, I don't know if this is a kernel issue or not. I just don't know where else to look for help. I seem to be having a conflict between fuse and loopback devices. I can get each to work fine independently, but I can get them to work together. This has worked with older kernels, but I can't get it to work with a 3.16.6 kernel. I'm just guessing the issue is a kernel issue. I really don't want to have to compile kernels to track this down, but it may come to that. All userspace tools I'm using are opensource, so I dod have the userspace source to work with, although I'm not the author. ===== I'm trying to use a tool (ewfmount) that leverages the fuse kernel sub-system to merge several files together and also uncompress them. Thus I might originally have: image.E01 image.E02 image.E03 where each of those files is a segment of full dd image that has been compressed. If I run "ewfmount image.E01 /mnt" then a virtual file /mnt/ewf1 is created. That is working fine. In the past I have been able to now loopback mount partitions from that virtual file via: mount -t hfsplus -r -o loop,offset=209735680 /mnt/ewf1 /mnt Currently that is failing with: mount: /mnt/ewf1: failed to setup loop device: Permission denied Thus loop back seems broken. To test that I copied the virtual file to a real file via dd. After that mount properly accesses the true file. === Thus: fuse is working right to merge my files together and uncompress them. loopback is working right when the object being mounted is a standard file. loopback is failing when pointed at the virtual file created by fuse. === I am suspicious of the kernel because this has worked for me in the pastk but with older kernels. I can't say when it last worked, but at least a year ago. Any suggestions / help appreciated. Thanks Greg -- Greg Freemyer