It is used to copy a specified number of bytes or blocks, performing on-the-fly byte order conversions, as well as more esoteric EBCDIC to ASCII conversions. It can also be used to copy regions of raw device files, for example backing up the boot sector of a hard disk, or to read fixed amounts of ...
2
votes
2answers
64 views
with a dd of an entire disk can you restore only a specific partition
I have a full dd of my hard disk which has 3 partitions, how can I using this image only restore a specific partition?
1
vote
2answers
56 views
how to prepare a harddisk for another computer
My old laptop died lately and I want to have it fixed by a repair-shop.
Now first I want to clean the hard disk (via an external 2,5 inch casing).
I managed to connect the drive via USB in order to ...
3
votes
1answer
43 views
Mapping dd commands to ddrescue
I'm trying to back up the Windows Recovery Partition on a laptop using ddrescue. I tried using dd, but I kept getting an Input Output error (at about 9.65 GB through, if it matters), so I learned that ...
1
vote
3answers
85 views
can dd be used to wipe clean a directory?
I have a directory on a Mint install that I want to wipe clean (not just delete the pointers, actually zero the info off the drive). is it possible to clear the data by using dd? For example, if the ...
2
votes
0answers
77 views
dd performance on Mac OSX vs Linux
I was trying to copy an iso of the windows installer onto a hard drive to avoid burning a disk. I first tried Disk Utility's restore function, however it didn't like the ISO for some reason. Then I ...
2
votes
1answer
62 views
Migrating to LVM
The drive on my Ubuntu media server is nearly full. I hope to add another 2TB of capacity to the machine and would prefer for all 3.5 TB to be recognized as a single drive. To complicate things, I ...
2
votes
2answers
83 views
Why is GNU shred faster than dd when filling a drive with random data?
While securely erasing a hard drive before decommissioning I noticed, that dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda takes nearly a whole day, whereas shred -vf -n 1 /dev/sda only takes a couple of hours with ...
1
vote
3answers
493 views
How to create VHD disk image from a Linux live system?
Once more, I have to resort at the experts here at SuperUser, as my other sources (mainly Google ;-)) didn't prove very helpful...
So basically, I would like to create a VHD image of a physical disk ...
2
votes
1answer
149 views
Linux DD command partition -to- partition
I just used the DD command to copy the contents of one partition over to another partition on another drive, like this:
dd if=/dev/sda2 of=/dev/sdb2 bs=4096 conv=noerror
sda2 partition was 66GB and ...
2
votes
3answers
339 views
Why does 'dd' not work for creating bootable USB?
Recently I wanted to create a bootable USB of Linux mint. I found that there was a lot of conflicting advice/experience about whether the 'dd' command could be used to create a bootable USB. I decided ...
0
votes
0answers
47 views
Restoring Vista installation from a partition image
Can I restore a Vista installation from a partition image and not have to image the entire disk?
If I had these:
A Vista partition image saved to an external disk using dd or ddrescue.
A copy ...
0
votes
2answers
214 views
Windows XP virtual machine hangs in VirtualBox
What i want to do:
I'm trying to virtualise 2 different physical Windows XP systems which reside on one hard drive each to VirtualBox under Windows 7.
What I did (once per drive):
From a Linux ...
2
votes
1answer
88 views
Getting position of track and sector in 'dd'-created floppy image
I got some floppy images (original DOS 6.22 und FreeDOS 1.44 MB boot disks) created using the *nix ddcommand that work fine when used in a virtual environment.
Now I want to understand the structure ...
0
votes
0answers
43 views
Clone Image Without Empty Blocks
I've been using dd if/mnt/sda1/images/$1 of=/dev/$2 to clone some embedded images for compact flashes. I used to only be using one brand of CFs, but, now I have two of them (both 2g, but obviously ...
1
vote
1answer
142 views
Copy existing Ubuntu drive to partition on new hard drive
I have a new laptop with two partitions, one is currently loaded with Windows 7, the other is blank.
I'm pretty familiar with using dd to backup/copy drives, but I'm wondering how I will deal with ...
1
vote
1answer
143 views
Do Linux swap partitions need to be cloned?
I'm in the process of cloning my hard disk in order to test some unstable software.
One of the partitions is Linux-swap. From my understanding, it can be used by the os as additional ram. So this ...
1
vote
2answers
128 views
What is the difference between dd's direct and fsync options?
I would like to copy an image to a USB thumb drive. As I would like to get "real" speeds, and don't want to wait ages for the device to sync after copying the image, I would like to know which ...
0
votes
3answers
65 views
Can I dd from my current hard drive to another hard drive while running the OS
My initial thought is that this is a bad idea.
But let's assume that I can't take a USB stick into my lab to run a live-Linux distro, and my computer has only 2-SATA ports. I have one 80GB SATA drive ...
0
votes
2answers
136 views
How to output file from the specified offset, but not “dd bs=1 skip=N”?
How to do thing like dd if=somefile bs=1 skip=1337 count=31337000, but efficiently, not using not 1-byte reads and writes?
The solution is expected:
To be simple (for non-simple I can write some ...
3
votes
1answer
223 views
Compressing a file in place - does “gzip -c file | dd of=file” really work?
In the question How can I compress a file on Linux in-place, without using additional disk space?, one answer proposes to simply use
gzip -c file | dd of=file
I tried it (on Debian Linux), and it ...
3
votes
1answer
258 views
Can you successfully clone a Mac OS X boot volume directly to another larger volume with ddrescue?
Can you clone a Mac OS X boot volume (specifically a "Mac OS Extended, Journaled" a.k.a. JHFS+ volume) directly to another, larger volume using ddrescue or even dd, and have the target volume end up ...
2
votes
1answer
54 views
Checking if any data exists on a presumably empty storage device
So, say you've completed a full pass of:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=1M
Then, you'd like to make sure the destination has been really zeroed out (ignoring the confirmation messages from dd ...
0
votes
2answers
79 views
Copy just the 64 byte partition table using dd
Given:
===MBR INFO===
MBR SECTOR NAME BYTES
code area 440(max. 446)
disk signature (optional) 4
Usually nulls; 0x0000 2
Table of primary partitions 64(Four ...
1
vote
0answers
129 views
Is it possible to repair iso images incorrectly made with dd in OSX Snow Leopard?
About a year ago, I made rips of a bunch of my CD/DVD games and packed the originals away.
The problem is that now I'm trying to use WinXP Pro on VirtualBox on OSX Snow Leopard to play these iso ...
1
vote
1answer
42 views
Multiple /dev entries for the floppy drive, can not write to drive
I have an old computer that I am trying to use to write to a floppy. It is running Ubuntu 10.10 and is a Dell. Every time I try to mount the floppy drive, it fails (probably because I don't know the ...
1
vote
2answers
536 views
How do I create an MBR on a USB stick using DD command line tool
Okay I'm trying to create a BOOTABLE Windows7 image on a USB key from a Mac running Lion. My image is .iso format. I tried:
sudo dd if=/Users/myusername/Win7.iso of=/dev/disk1 bs=1m
And this ...
1
vote
0answers
47 views
Maintaining peak IO potential with DD / CP
I wanted to copy a file (40 gig dataset) from a single drive to a dual disk raid-0 drive. I tried with CP and it sustained read - 4mb and write - 11 mb (doesn't make sense I know (must be the stripe ...
2
votes
1answer
177 views
What is the difference between ghost and dd?
When I back up from one hard drive to another with Ghost I can switch those hard drives at will and the computer doesn't seem to mind. When I back up HDD A onto HDD B with dd, HDD B performs slower ...
7
votes
4answers
1k views
Why is my /dev/random so slow when using dd?
I am trying to semi-securely erase a bunch of hard drives. The following is working at 20-50Mb/s
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda
But
dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sda
seems not to work. Also when I ...
0
votes
1answer
53 views
how to recover my hard drive…put an iso image on it with dd
I did the following:
dd if=some.iso of=/dev/sda
Or some such craziness. How should I recover from this? Gparted, etc..., didn't help out, deleting partition etc... Whenever I try to install a ...
3
votes
1answer
275 views
dd_rescue vs dcfldd vs dd
What are the main differences between dd_rescue, dcfldd, and dd? In what situations would you use one over the other? Why are there three different yet simliar programs?
0
votes
1answer
267 views
How to copy an ISO image onto USB with dd
The last paragraph says,
The ISO image now uses a 'hybrid' system: it can also be copied onto an USB stick without formating it (using dd).
Does anyone know how to do this?
1
vote
1answer
85 views
Can I use dd to clone two drives from two machines simultaneously?
To clarify, I have two machines: Machine1 and Machine2. Each machine has 2 disks (Machine1 has Disk1-1 and Disk1-2; simiarly, Machine2 has Disk2-1 and Disk2-2). Can I use 'dd' to clone Disk1-1 to ...
0
votes
1answer
465 views
Rescuing a hdd with bad sectors: dd vs gddrescue
Somewhere on the internets I read that gddrescue is superior to dd at least in terms of being able to distinguish between the amount of disk reads performed on a troubled sector. Is this really the ...
-1
votes
1answer
372 views
rescuing a hard drive with bad sectors: dd vs gddrescue [closed]
Possible Duplicate:
[rescuing a hard drive with bad sectors: dd vs gddrescue](http://superuser.com/questions/347916/rescuing-a-hard drive-with-bad-sectors-dd-vs-gddrescue)
Somewhere on the ...
1
vote
1answer
124 views
Does `dd` on a device skip anything?
I wanted to achieve a system disk backup with an Ubuntu live CD. I used the following command:
dd if=/dev/sda conv=sync,noerror bs=64K | gzip -c > /media/external/image.gz
This seemed to work. ...
2
votes
2answers
78 views
Reading from the end of a drive with dd
How can I read from the end of a drive with dd? I thought about using size - to_read but I have no idea how to get the size in bytes.
1
vote
2answers
187 views
How can I mount a disk image?
I have a disk image myimage.disk which contains the partition table and a primary partition (i.e. a FAT32 filesystem). Think that as a USB pen image.
I want to mount the primary partition to a local ...
4
votes
1answer
101 views
Trying to create an ISO of my bootable USB using the unix command: dd
i'm trying to create a (bootable) ISO (which i'll then burn to dvd) from the source being an bootable USB disk (it contains windows 7 and i've installed a number of PC's from it already).
So i'm ...
4
votes
2answers
172 views
Recovering Ubuntu after filesystem was overwritten using dd
I had an Ubuntu installation on my laptop, on an encrypted LVM (this was /dev/sda1).
I was planning to write an Arch Linux image to my USB drive (/dev/sdc1), following this guide - ...
0
votes
3answers
217 views
How can I copy my Mac's entire hard drive to an external hard drive?
I want to copy my entire hard drive to an external hard drive of equivalent size. I'm using a Mac, and I was thinking about booting Ubuntu so that I can use dd, but I'm not sure how to do that. If ...
2
votes
2answers
183 views
How to make a floppy image and overwrite the MBR
I am trying to make a floppy image with a working file system so that I can test a 2 stage boot loader. When I attempt to mount the floppy and then cp the second binary over to it, mount gets all ...
2
votes
0answers
158 views
Why does my disk ignore erase and write commands to some sectors?
I did an ATA secure erase on an SSD (with SystemRescueCD and hdparm). Some parts of the disk are reset to zero, but some parts are not. In particular, the MBR and the boot sector of a Windows Vista ...
1
vote
2answers
99 views
The 'real', 'user' and 'sys' description from time(1) differ when they shouldn't?
I read this SO question on 'real', 'user', and 'sys' descriptions and thought I'd play a little. Can someone explain why
[root@lux ~]# time dd if=/dev/zero of=del.large bs=10K count=32768
32768+0 ...
0
votes
1answer
329 views
Mount part of a dd image as a truecrypt volume
I have a dd image of a full drive (as a file) that was using Truecrypt system encryption under windows. I want to mount the main partition from that image using Linux's Truecrypt. I am familiar with ...
3
votes
1answer
306 views
Using dd with bad blocks on a harddrive?
I'm looking to use dd to make a clone of failing harddrive. My concern is there will be bad blocks for surely. So my question is with dd will a bad block leave a gap the size of the selected ...
1
vote
1answer
312 views
How to do a hexdump of first track of HDD?
How would i do a hexdump in Ubuntu for the first track of a HDD?
I am looking for a winhex-esque output if that makes sense. The first track has 63 sectors, each 512 bytes long. I tried
dd ...
0
votes
1answer
222 views
How to wipe one sector with DD?
What is the dd command in Linux for securely wiping sector 62 of a hard drive. This sector lies in track zero, begins at offset 31744 and is 512 bytes long.
I'd like to know how to wipe it over 1000 ...
1
vote
1answer
269 views
How to make a partition if I have a partition.img file?
I have an Acer laptop I've been toying with, at some point I backed up the 'Acer recovery' hidden partition using dd.
iirc I used a LiveCD and something like:
dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/mnt/remote/acer.img
...
0
votes
1answer
577 views
osx sudo dd if=/dev/disk0 of=/dev/disk1
Am I doing this right? The process isn't very verbose
I am upgrading my HDD, I have a larger external drive I want inside my macbook.
I want to copy the contents and partitions of my internal mac ...
