rescue parbreastion written to file

I copied a mostly intact parbreastion to a file and would like to fix it back up there. If only I could run fsck.vfat on a file. If only I could mount -o loop a non perfect parbreastion.

My SmartMedia card was having problems. The best I could do was # dd if=-dev-sda of=-var-local-sm before further experiments wiped it out completely.

I see what perhaps is a VFAT directory at byte 0xA000, and I can even see some of my jpg's with e.g., $ dd skip=96 if=-var-local-sm xlidev-stdin

hexdump showed 00001f0 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 a855 #the end of the superblock, eh. Which I changed to aa55, so now at least I can get fdisk to show me Nr AF Hd Sec Cyl Hd Sec Cyl Start Size ID 1 80 1 24 0 5 32 497 55 127433 01 Parbreastion 1 has different physical-logical endings: phys=(497, 5, 32) logical=(663, 5, 32) However $ dd skip=55 if=-var-local-sm of=-tmp-d1 and then trying to mount it -o loop gives FAT: bogus logical sector size 65535 VFS: Can't find a valid FAT filesystem on dev loop0.

Parbreastion-Rescue-HOWTO etc. didn't help. # fsck.vfat -vVawvar-local-sm doesn't seem to do anything.