hi, i am still catching up in the thread but i wanted to warn that dd is very destructive. judging by the syntax errors in the first post you probably irrevocably overwritten some data in the wrong partition.

and now judging by your response in post #3 you seem not to know if you want an image backup of a partition or the whole disk. having a game plan prior to starting will prevent you from accidentally destroying your system.

basically what is it you want to backup and where do you want to save it ?

How can I get back to /dev/sdb from the (somehow) newly acquired /dev/sdc?

^ the above question doesnt make sense to me.

it seems like you are wanting to make an image backup of your non-running windows-xp partition, correct ?

please show us the results of with everything plugged in, in [code] tags.

@ schneidz

I just want to make an image file of sda1 onto an external drive. I did this a long time ago with Windows7 onto this same external drive. It was a three button event. There must be some way to do it in Linux.

@ schneidz

No I don't have windows. This is a 12.04-nonPAE machine that was given to me with a broken XP that I have wiped out and installed 12.04

@scneidz

fdisk no longer sees my external drive because I can't mount it

joseph@joseph-TravelMate-2300:~$ sudo fdisk -l
[sudo] password for joseph:

Disk /dev/sda: 60.0 GB, 60011642880 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7296 cylinders, total 117210240 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0004710d

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 2048 113051647 56524800 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 113053694 117209087 2077697 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 113053696 117209087 2077696 82 Linux swap / Solaris

@ schneidz

Hey!! It sees my external drive as sdb1 again :-)

joseph@joseph-TravelMate-2300:~$ mount
/dev/sda1 on / type ext4 (rw,errors=remount-ro)
proc on /proc type proc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
none on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw)
none on /sys/kernel/debug type debugfs (rw)
none on /sys/kernel/security type securityfs (rw)
udev on /dev type devtmpfs (rw,mode=0755)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=0620)
tmpfs on /run type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,size=10,mode=0755)
none on /run/lock type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,size=5242880)
none on /run/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev)
gvfs-fuse-daemon on /home/joseph/.gvfs type fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon (rw,nosuid,nodev,user=joseph)
/dev/sdb1 on /media type fuseblk (rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,blksize=4096)

well doing an image backup while a partition is in use is a bad idea since data mite be written to it while the image process is happening.

what i do is boot into a live-usb.
then i run fdisk -l to list the partitions.
i make sure the source partition is unmounted and the destination partition is mounted.
and run something like:

1 members found this post helpful.

@ schneidz - compare these two outputs

joseph@joseph-TravelMate-2300:~$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use Mounted on
/dev/sda1 54G 25G 26G 49% /
udev 992M 4.0K 992M 1% /dev
tmpfs 200M 788K 199M 1% /run
none 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock
none 999M 100K 999M 1% /run/shm
/dev/sdb1 1.9T 421G 1.5T 23% /media

joseph@joseph-TravelMate-2300:~$ lsblk -l
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda 8:0 0 55.9G 0 disk
sda1 8:1 0 53.9G 0 part /
sda2 8:2 0 1K 0 part
sda5 8:5 0 2G 0 part [SWAP]
sr0 11:0 1 1024M 0 rom
sdc 8:32 0 1.8T 0 disk
sdc1 8:33 0 1.8T 0 part

@ schneidz

now I am not sure to use sdb1 or sdc1 as the destination target??

@ schneidz yesterday I could mount the ext.hdd from gui file manager. The output from lsblk -l

2300:~$ lsblk -l
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda 8:0 0 55.9G 0 disk
sda1 8:1 0 53.9G 0 part /
sda2 8:2 0 1K 0 part
sda5 8:5 0 2G 0 part [SWAP]
sr0 11:0 1 1024M 0 rom
sdb 8:16 0 1.8T 0 disk
sdb1 8:17 0 1.8T 0 part /media/Seagate Expansion Drive

---------- Post added 06-05-15 at 01:26 PM ----------

@ scheidz wish I could buy you a beer :-)

Gparted sees the ext. drive as /dev/sdc

When I try to mount the ext. HDD from GUI filemanager as root, I get this result:

Error: Daemon is inhibited

Can this have something to do with the change from sdb to sdc and the inability to mount the external drive?

Where is this Daemon?

its hard to read your output because they arent between [code] tags.
that is kinda' weird. according your df -h output you have a 1.9 terabyte disk of which 421 gb is used (is this your external drive ?). if so it is mounted under /media. can you browse and verify it is the data you are expecting to see ?

also, are you running from a live-usb ?

1 members found this post helpful.

Hmm...seems like using dd to create an image file to an external drive is a difficult problem. I have not been able to find a solution in the various forums.

My HDD is getting slower. I want to make an image of /dev/sda1, not on a file on my computer because the HDD is not big enough, but make the image on an external drive.

I am trying to do this from a live CD so that the partition I want to image is not mounted. The problem seems to revolve around identifying the output file.

When I use the app Partimage from the live CD it complains that I am not root and says it cannot find /dev/sda1. When I use the same app from the computer itself, Partimage says it cannot image a partition that is in use. So for me, Partimage appears as useless.

When I use the dd command from a live cd it fails to find the of=/dev/sdb1/DiskDump
of=/media/sdb1/DiskDump
of=/media/Seagate Expansion Drive/DiskDump
of=/media/SeagateExpansionDrive/DiskDump
It returns that the of= is not a file or directory.

If I make the of=/sdb1/ it returns that "sdb1 is a directory." PERFECT! So why doesn't it do it?

I'll keep trying various combinations. :-)