How to shrink .img file?

NoDiskNoFun · 08-24-2012, 02:12 PM

Hey Dudes,

i tried to shrink an Image of my ARM-Linux. but resize2fs told me that the size of the file is the minimum size i can use, but i know that there is up to 7oo MB free space in that file.

Some details:

It got an MS-DOS partition table and its formatted in ext4

thanks for help,
NoDiskNoFun

business_kid · 08-24-2012, 02:47 PM

Have you tried

gzip -9 your.img

It writes your.img.gz

NoDiskNoFun · 08-24-2012, 03:04 PM

no i need it smaller for faster flashing.
i meant something like shrink HDD (resize2fs /dev/sda1 ???M)

jefro · 08-24-2012, 03:41 PM

Your image is a result of the drive structure so you want to make a smaller drive and copy the data to it.

You could do as business_kid suggests after you zero out free space. The zeros would compress a lot but still wait to write them on a dd command.

Might move to file based copy and could pipe it via some compression.