I think the thread is a 'lil off topic. Sudo or root or not, I am curious if you have had success with the permission issues, dd and the drive. Have you tried chown on the actual device in the /dev/ directory? Example: $chown user:user /dev/sdb1 and have you checked the permissions on the device? You need to make sure you have ownership, permissions and write abilities to the drive, and the mounted directory.

I'm sorry but your curiosity is going to have to go unsatisfied. I just don't have the time at present to experiment with things; I lost a lot of time trying to overcome Ubuntu's constant objections. I did the job with Puppy with no dramas in about 5 minutes flat so great job, Barry, should you be reading this! :-D

Well, the last error message in you exposition is simply because you used media instead of /media. But that doesn't address the problem you had unziping the compressed image file.

You used gunzip -c /dev/sdc6/pi_raspbian_timelock_entire_image_latest.gz, but I think you probably needed the -k option so gzip wouldn't delete the .gz file (which it would, of course, do by default). Um, noting that, does your pi_raspbian_timelock_entire_image_latest.gz file still exist on your backup drive? If not, that would explain the "not a directory" error message.

By the way, when you created the pi_raspbian_timelock_entire_image_latest.gz did you do it by a dd -of=pi_raspbian_timelock_entire_image_latest -if=/dev/... bs=4096 followed by a gzip pi_raspbian_timelock_entire_image_latest? If you did almost anything else, you don't have a drive image file in pi_raspbian_timelock_entire_image_latest.gz.

Well spotted, sir!

I wasn't aware of that. But despite several re-images now and no use of the -k option, the image file hasn't gone anywhere. Thankfully!

Yes, dd output piped to gzip in one operation.

Well, can you do a gunzip -ck /dev/sdc6/pi_raspbian_timelock_entire_image_latest.gz | cat > pi_raspbian_timelock_entire_image_latest.img to recreate the image on you hard drive?

Oh, before that can you do a ls /dev/sdc6/*.gx to see if that syntax is correct. Normally, to read from a device, the device must be mounted. It's only when dd is outputting a device image that the actual device name is used.

I refer you to the answer I gave in post #17...

A little off topic, I have a word about the "sudo" and "su" commands. From my experience, I never could run the "su" command directly. Instead, I would have to do to get to be the root.

Hope you find this useful!

Here's something very much more useful:

No messin' about.