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 ...
1
vote
1answer
60 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
46 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
2answers
32 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
44 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
100 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
64 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
43 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
47 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
46 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
32 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
192 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
34 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 ...
1
vote
1answer
119 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
463 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
35 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 ...
2
votes
1answer
113 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
72 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
52 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
159 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
124 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
84 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
1answer
42 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
84 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
57 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
100 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
138 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
112 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
108 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
59 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
221 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
177 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
204 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
159 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
167 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
359 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 ...
2
votes
1answer
242 views
Can I resume an interrupted disk image done with dd?
I am going to reinstall my system and I want to backup it first.
There is an 80 GB HDD with Ubuntu and 750 GB HDD on which I want to put image. So, I run a live CD and use dd to transfer my sda to ...
0
votes
1answer
191 views
How to boot dd image in QEMU?
I created an image of my Debian Squeeze running on a Sheevaplug using dd if=/dev/sda of=plug_SD-karte.img (sda is the SD card plugged into another computer). Now I want to emulate the Sheevaplug. I ...
2
votes
4answers
86 views
Can I copy the Macintosh HD to migrate my data to a new Mac?
I want to get a new Mac. Can I simply dd a disk image from my older mac's hdd to the new Mac with a bigger HDD (this will be further partitioned, but the old osx drive will fit within one OS X-style ...
2
votes
1answer
75 views
cleanup after “dd” operation
I'm using dd with "excl" option. If interrupted with CTRL+C "dd" leaves the the file it has created and not finished to write. I need to clean it up in such case with the trap INT. However, I don't ...
0
votes
1answer
314 views
How to create an image.dd file to be used in virtualbox?
I want to backup my Windows machine before I put Ubuntu on the hard drive instead.
Following the instructions on the VirtualBox website it says to create an image.dd file using dd.
I booted up from ...
1
vote
2answers
1k views
How to pad a file with “FF” using dd?
How to pad a file with 0xFF using dd?
This command will pad the output file with zeroes until the file size reaches 100 KB:
dd if=inputFile.bin ibs=1k count=100 of=paddedFile.bin conv=sync
...
0
votes
1answer
62 views
What number of bytes should I set the bs to in the dd command?
I have just created a usb boot disk so that I can install Fedora 14.
I used the following which was successfully. However, I am left wondering what does the bs parameter actually does. I know it mean ...
2
votes
1answer
99 views
wipe disk with dd
I know we can wipe a hard disk using random data or zeros, but is it possible to wipe using a fixed string ?
e.g. is this correct?
dd if="string" of=/my/harddisk ...
Also, does the options below ...
0
votes
0answers
118 views
DD-WRT Issue (bricked router) [closed]
I have a Linksys WRT54G and I followed some steps on how to use DDWRT software. I seem to have bricked my router. When I feed the router power the only lights that go on are the LAN ports the power ...
1
vote
4answers
167 views
Is it a very bad idea to create disk image of mounted disk?
I would like to backup my server. For example using dd:
dd if=/dev/md0 of=/some_network_share
I wonder if this image will be vary inconsistent if /dev/md0 is mounted? Would it be possible to ...
0
votes
3answers
80 views
OSX: can I dd a usb thumb drive into a file?
I have mounted a usb thumb drive into my MBP.
Here is the partial output from mount
/dev/disk2s1 on /Volumes/KINGSTON (ntfs, local, nodev, nosuid, read-only, noowners)
When I tried
$ dd ...
0
votes
1answer
244 views
“Target filesystem doesn't have sbin/init” after cloning boot disk with dd
I cloned a boot disk (bootloader, / and swap partitions) with dd to the same size disk (bad sectors started to appear). Got 1 reading error in the middle of the disk. After I swapped the disks I ...
0
votes
1answer
591 views
How to Copy .VHD File to Physical Hard Disk Using DD Command
I have read other question/answers on this site that say this is possible, but I'm wondering how it is done. I have tried the following command, which completes successfully, but the NTFS isn't valid ...
2
votes
3answers
245 views
Advice on cloning disk
I'm going to buy a second disk for backup, the same size as my laptops. I want to mount it in a casing via usb and backup an entire hdd every soemtime. That's because I want the posibility to just ...
1
vote
1answer
226 views
Why does my dd backup of MacBook OS X fail to boot upon restore?
I created a backup of a MacBook hard drive (WD2500BEVS-88US) by hooking it up as a secondary drive on my linux system (Ubuntu 10.10). I used the following command:
sudo dd if=/dev/sdc ...
