Clone 8 GB USB DOS boot disk to 4 GB USB drive

agntsgotnosecret · 03-22-2010, 10:11 AM

Hello,

I have a Sandizk Cruzer USB drive that is 8 GB and presently is formatted as a FAT32 DOS-bootable disk with my utilities.

I also have a Patriot XT 4 GB flash drive that I would like to replace the Sandisk USB drive, so I am attempting to make an exact copy of the the Sandisk (8 GB) drive to the Patriot (4 GB) drive, primarily the DOS-bootable functionality.

From what I've researched online, cloning a larger USB hard drive to a smaller one can be a lengthy process, so I was just wondering how I'd go about accomplishing this.

Any ideas would be more than welcome -- thanks!

ctkroeker · 03-22-2010, 10:17 AM

I´d expect that you would have to shrink the 8GB partition to on the same (or smaller) size of the 4GB one, than use a tool like dd to clone it. There have been several questions like this on LQ, such as http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...estion-773349/

agntsgotnosecret · 03-22-2010, 10:40 AM

How can I copy the "MBR" basically so that the new drive is bootable?

Restoring the partitions is easy enough, yes.

I ran the following commands, but I'm not sure they will work:

dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sdc bs=512 count=1 <-- To copy the master sectors so that the drive is DOS bootable?
dd if=/dev/sdb1 of=/dev/sdc1 bs=1024 <-- Cloning of original partition to new disk