have a W95 HDD that I've placed in an external USB HDD enclosure that I want to make a bootable DVD copy of.

fdisk -l shows these devices:

<snip>
Partition table entries are not in disk order

Disk /dev/sdb: 2111 MB, 2111864832 bytes
64 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1023 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 4032 * 512 = 2064384 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 1 1022 2060320+ 6 FAT16

I tried this command:


eric@lenovo-1:~/Desktop$ sudo dd /dev/sdb1 Moms_HDD


Which generated this error message:


dd: unrecognized operand `/dev/sdb1'
Try `dd --help' for more information.

So I have two questions:
1. What should my dd command be?

2. If I then burn the contents of this folder (Moms_HDD) onto a DVD, will I have a bootable DVD that will run that old system?

Thanks.
EB

Well first of all, dd isn't going to give you a folder full of files, it will give you one large image file. Putting that back onto another HDD would give you a bootable clone of that drive, but it isn't an ISO image so you can't directly burn it to a disc. More importantly, even if you could, Windows can't run that way; it needs to be installed onto the drive in order to function.

As for the dd command, you need to give it at least the input and output parameters for it to function, "if" and "of" respectively. The correct command would be:

Duh! That's why I'm not a programmer--little things like if= and of=.

OK--so it won't make a bootable disk. But could I copy it to a disk like I might any other file and then when I want to run it, copy it from the disk to a hard drive partition?

Thanks.

Yes, you could store the created image on a DVD-R or external drive, and then write it back to the HDD to restore it.

You might want to look into something like PartImage which is a tool designed to save and restore individual partitions for backup purposes. It is more robust than just using dd, as you can do things like image compression and splitting (not to say you can't do that with dd, but you would need to do it all manually).

Thanks, MS3FGX.
This should get me on the right road.

EB