mount: Operation not permitted

I have an ext4 filesystem image named linux-partition-image that I want to get data off of, and executing the command

mount ./linux-partition-image mountdir -o ro,loop

as root results in the message mount: mountdir: mount failed: Operation not permitted. The same message shows up if I give the command a directory that doesn't exist, so the error must be happening before the mount operation itself.

1 Answer

I get that as well, and there is no need to reboot the machine to mount the image.

Simply issue

modprobe loop

and I can do mount -o loop afterwards.