Loop Device – Understanding Device Type ‘loop’ in Mount Command

Ok I know this was a while back but for some reason no one has made this information easily available so here is the answer:

It's very very simple.

Run sudo apt-get install ldmtool then make sure your drive is actually there by checking with sudo fdisk -l and once you have ldmtool downloaded, try to see if the harddrive is recognized by running sudo ldmtool scan. The print out should be a json like string with the device id. Finish by writing sudo ldmtool create all. DONE. You can now go to your /media folder and see all your mounted drives along with the newly mounted SFS partition!

I have written a blog post about this.

Basically you just need to create a virtual block device at /dev/sdX, and mount your LOFS on it. Then you can run the installer and install Ubuntu on it. But please note that you cannot install GRUB directly on it (and there is no point to do so).