Closed source software cannot be examined, and peer reviewed to determine what it does, or doesn't do. Any software author/publisher can SAY anything. It isn't illegal to claim a product does something intangible, like preserve privacy, when the product doesn't really preserve anything.

You might get a good feeling from reading all the fantastic things software can do, but if you can't look at the code, you never know, until you get busted, or killed.

Computers have legitimate uses. Recording confidential information is an improper use of a PC in the hands of someone who thinks 'Eraser' can wipe a drive, completely, several times, in only 3 hours.

Everything you have ever done with your computer is recorded in files to which no user access exists. The Microsoft Windows XP file system fundamentally changes upon shutdown. Any program that uses any Microsoft operating system needs to observe Microsoft software policies that prevent total data security.

The PC represents data storage and processing capability unprecedented in history. The Linux philosophy of security is to NOT use computers to store OR process information that is sensitive to the point that the user lacks resources to combat a security breech.

For a government, those resources are impressive. Governments can combat computer security breeches if necessary. Being honest, and remaining free from sin are the best security measures one can take. All things are pure to the pure. Suspicion is the device of a guilty mind.

It's permanent

You could try the 'bs=' parameter, with bs=4k.

Slackware is still using the 2.4 kernel as the default. The newest version has the 2.6 kernel available as an option. You probably want to use the 2.6 kernel, and this could also be a bios issue.

There are around 250 4M blocks per GB*250 GB=62500. There are a number of things that can account for this, but the number you are getting is acceptable. You're not supposed to fill the drive past 90% formatted capacity. Since I don't know the exact details, and I don't want to know, I can't say where the discrepancy lies. Its probably due to a number of factors. Don't worry about it. The definitions for the multiplicative suffixes are in the post. I believe M=1000*1000.

Hi,
Slackware 12.0 uses the 2.6 kernel with no 2.4 option. The 2.4 kernel was dropped for Slackware 12.0 with Slackware 11 the kernel default was 2.4 with the option of using the 2.6.

In reply to the tracking of one's partner's activity a woman could try 'cheating men uncovered.com'

Best DD info yet!

Keep up the good work.

Thx
prnull

wow !!

very interesting ideas

*thank you very much* for sharing

An excellent article as this deserves a printer-friendly version !

Go to the top of the page. Click on "thread tools". Chose "show printable version". Print it or read it or whatever...

AwesomeMachine you rock! Thank you very much for sharing your knowledge and ideas!

I used to dd every machine that needs to be re-installed (mostly Windows of course) through a LiveCD. What is cool is that there is no place for mistakes! I just dd every partition to an image file on an usb drive with conv=notrunc,noerror. Then, if I forgot backing up a single file of the "old" system, I just plug the usb drive to a Linux machine and use "mount -o loop,ro" on the dd image file to read the content! That's really wonderful.

Actually, that WAS really wonderful :-S Let me explain. Today, I did it on a Windows Vista machine, dd was okay as usual. Now I'd like to mount the image file but it asks (for the first time!) for the filesystem. So I add "-t ntfs" but I keep getting "NTFS signature missing"! I already did Vista cloning (and image mounting) with no pain (and without using -t ntfs). I had some problems with "not correctly unmounted" images (XP and Vista) but the -o force option made the job. But now I'm stuck! So I come back to this wonderful thread (that was a long time!) for some piece of information and I can read "dd won't work with Vista OEM"! Damn... I made it already! Why won't it work now?! I read new replies about "new NTFS in Vista" but I can't understand why it worked for me till now!

Hope someone will be able to help.


EDIT : made the job! It took me ages to realise that I did /dev/sda image instead of /dev/sda1... that was really stupid

I'm glad it works now. For anyone else with this problem: The best of my knowledge dictates there are slight partitioning scheme changes with NTFS Vista. Dd can be used, but the filesystem image needs to be written to the exact same partition the image was made from.

Even on this, some say to leave the OEM Vista partition alone, save shrinking it, because dd doesn't understand the new NTFS. ?? I'm not sure. I would like you to post more details, but be judicious. Dd is changing rapidly, in small, but hugely usable ways.

Microsoft doesn't publish the NTFS spec, so open source uses some hit or miss, and convergence methods to guess the spec.

Actually, they're specific to Vista's management of disk partitions, not to NTFS per se: NTFS hasn't changed in any major way since Win2K/XP, and in fact all three systems can interoperate on each other's NTFS environments successfully. Their Disk Management partition operations, however, can destroy each other's partitions under some circumstances (and there's a minor NTFS incompatibility in that accessing a Vista NTFS system with WinXP can wipe out Vista's system restore points because WinXP considers them to be corrupt).

That should generally be safe. If you want to do anything more ambitious, it's important to understand (and cope with) Vista's new partitioning strategies and also with its new boot mechanism.

The latter abandons the previous boot.ini-based mechanism (where you used to have to edit boot.ini to update location information if the partition order on the disk changed - though perhaps not if the Windows 'system' and 'boot' partitions were one and the same) in favor of a 'boot configuration database' (BCD)-based mechanism which is sensitive to absolute partition location on the specific disk. What this means is that if you change the location, you have to change the BCD information so that Vista can find itself (even in cases where you might not have had to update boot.ini for earlier Windows versions). Probably the easiest way to do this (which you can - and must - do *before* moving the Vista system unless you want to mess around trying to update the BCD from outside that system after the move has occurred) is to 'generalize' the BCD information as described in http://www.multibooters.co.uk/cloning.html (part of a Web site with a great deal of useful information for those who wish to multi-boot Vista systems).

Furthermore, Microsoft, in its infinite wisdom, changed what had been industry-standard partition alignment for three decades or so. By default, Vista no longer aligns partition starts and ends on logical cylinder boundaries, but (usually, AFAICT) on something like 1 MB boundaries. What this means is that you may be able to use dd to move a Vista partition successfully (after having incorporated the boot adjustments described above) between environments that use the new-style alignment, or between environments that use the old-style alignment - but not from one to the other, because dd will wind up leaving unused space at the end of the moved partition due to the difference in size that the difference in alignment creates (and then even if the file system itself doesn't get upset because its new home isn't the size that it thought it was, other partition-management software - including that within Vista or Win2K/XP - may, and whether it will fix things up appropriately is at best a gamble). Worse yet, since Win2K/XP just assume that partitions should be aligned on traditional cylinder boundaries, if you have a new-style-alignment Vista system, install a Win2K/XP system on the same disk (or just decide to operate on the disk using something like Partition Magic that doesn't understand the new-style alignment), and then use the latter to perform partitioning on the disk (and vice versa IIRC), entire existing partitions can be lost due to alignment confusion.

(This is actually not a new problem with Vista, though had until now been fairly rare: older BIOSes - e.g., in some Thinkpads - sometimes used 240 logical heads per track rather than the usual 255 heads per track to create the 'logical cylinders' used to define traditional partition alignment, and this difference in partition alignment and therefore size could cause the same kind of problem when attempting to move a partition between environments using dd - and could also destructively confuse partition managers.)

Fortunately, more intelligent copiers like Acronis True Image (a free 'Personal' version of its version 8 may still be available, as well as a crippled free version of its version 10 in the form of Seagate's DiscWizard, though to use the latter it's got to be able to see a Seagate or Maxtor disk - an external USB drive is fine - somewhere in your system) are able to take an image of a Vista partition and restore it successfully (including any resizing required) to a different environment (though you still have to adjust the BCD as described earlier with V8 - V10 *might* be smart enough to do it for you).

The only thing you may still have to do (assuming that you had Vista on a new-style-aligned disk and moved it to an old-style-aligned disk) is to update the Vista Registry so that its Disk Management facilities won't perform new-style-aligned partition operations on the old-style-aligned disk (I'm not sure that it's too dumb to recognize the existing alignment, but at least suspect that it might use new-style alignment on any empty disks it met, which likely would not be what you wanted) - and the way to do that is described in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931760; that completes the process of undoing Microsoft's 'better' partitioning idea and returning Vista to the fold that the rest of the world occupies.

Whoa, now that is an impressive whopper of information, hats off, kudos, ant thank you .

Just out of interest, how do you do that, I mean with which tool and what parameters? <edit> I just learned (from your link) with an editor... </edit>

Out of curiosity: If you used a "bs=1M" parameter with dd, wouldn't that work?

PS: Your second link includes the semicolon and thus doesn't work on the first attempt. You might consider editing your post for easier use...