DD backup of whole drive

jobless_joe · 04-21-2006, 05:58 PM

Ok, I just made a backup of a small drive (a little less than 2 gigs) to another drive. I did

Code:

dd if=hda of=hdb

where hda is the small drive, and hdb is the large drive i backed it up to (its ~20 gigs). What I want to do is make a disk image of the 20 gig drive (i no longer have the 2 gig drive), as in...i want to do something like

Code:

dd if=hdb of=/location/on/another/drive/hdbimage.img

(hdb is the 20 gig drive). The problem is that I want just the 2 gig backup, instead of the whole 20 gig drive (mostly empty space). Doing a dd like the one above would make a 20gig image file. How do I get just the 2gig file? here is a fdisk -l of hdb (the 20 gig drive)

Code:

Disk /dev/hdb: 240 heads, 63 sectors, 2910 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 15120 * 512 bytes

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hdb1   *         1       273   2060320+   6  FAT16
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary:
     phys=(1021, 63, 63) should be (1021, 239, 63)

Bruce Hill · 04-21-2006, 06:18 PM

dd if=/dev/hda of=hda.iso
might work...

jlinkels · 04-21-2006, 08:07 PM

Since you are using FAT16 you can reliably assume there is no data beyond the 2 GB. So you could use:

dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdc bs=1M count=2k

Adapt /dev/hda and /dev/hdc to what you really need.

Have you seen this thread?

jlinkels