DISCUSSION: How To Do Eveything With DD

AwesomeMachine · 10-23-2005, 10:44 PM

This thread is to discuss the article titled: How To Do Eveything With DD

sk545 · 10-28-2005, 01:04 PM

wow, excellent.

Rich309 · 03-12-2006, 07:29 PM

Do you mean to say BS= can not be less than 512? I have run it at 2 and it seem to work. Am I being decieved?

w_r_cromwell · 03-24-2006, 11:55 AM

This is very helpful... thanks for your effort

Bill

anilbh · 12-13-2006, 07:56 AM

Wow is right ! But I had a tough time locating this article again .

harryhaller · 06-01-2007, 12:19 PM

when dd copies a partition, does it also copy the super-block?

In other words, if I copied my windows partition and then restored it, could I then boot from it, assuming, of course, that my boot manager was set up correctly?

Also, could I gezip the file of the partition to make it smaller, or does that cause problems when restoring?

kav · 06-01-2007, 12:51 PM

Quote:

Also, could I gezip the file of the partition to make it smaller, or does that cause problems when restoring?

I know there's got to be a way to do that manually, maybe even piped into one line. Clonezilla has that kind of functionality except with an easy to follow menu to get it all done. Wonderfull tool.

Heck, it might be as easy as $ dd if=/somefile | tar -czvf /compresed_image

fakie_flip · 10-05-2007, 01:50 PM

Quote:

Copy a disk partition to a file on a different partition. Do not copy a partition to the same partition.

dd if=/dev/sdb2 of=/home/sam/partition.image bs=4096 conv=notrunc,noerror

This will make a file that is an exact duplicate of the sdb2 partition. You can substitue hdb, sda, hda, or whatever the disk is called.

Restore a disk partition from an image file.

dd if=/home/sam/partition.image of=/dev/sdb2 bs=4096 conv=notrunc,noerror

Could someone please explain why bs=4096 and conv=notrunc,noerror is used?

DrCR · 12-21-2007, 02:49 PM

bs=446 count=1 is way to backup the MBR, but not the partition table, so yes, it can be less than 512.
bs=4096 - When copying large amounts, say, backing up a partition, bs=4096 tends to be the best choice for faster, more modern machines so I hear.

You can indeed compress on the fly, via piping. For example, here's the command I recently used to backup one of my partitions:
dd if=/dev/sda1 bs=4096 | bzip2 > OSXsda1_ddbackup.bz2

I don't know anything about conv= stuff...I haven't read the review yet, but still wanted to answer so of your questions.

DrCR

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