Cloning part of a Disc
 

I want to use the `dd` command to clone just the first 300Mb of a hard drive.
Would the following work ?

dd if=/dev/hda count=300000 of=/path/to/file/ 300meg.img

Should I specify a `bs` value ?

Many thanks.

I don't know if you have seen this yet, but here's a link to LQs own DD HOWTO.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=362506

You must clone the whole partition if you want an operating system to read it.

There is a default block size in dd (512 bytes=1/2Kbyte on my machine)

So, for 300Mbytes, you need count=600000

for large files, I think dd goes faster if you set a larger block size.

Thanks pixellany,
I added a bs=1024 and kept count to 300000 which did the trick.