Creating clone of a HDD including boot partition
Warren Block
wblock at wonkity.com
Wed Dec 15 19:20:07 UTC 2010
On Wed, 15 Dec 2010, bsd wrote:
> Is there a way to dd to a file to create an iso image and then restore (still using dd from this image).
> I only have one IDE <--> USB cable so this is the reason why It'd more simple for me to create an iso image of the disk and then restore.
Use dd's of= parameter to send output to a file. If it really has to be
an ISO, pipe it to mkisofs. Using dd like that makes big files with
lots of wasted space. The article I posted earlier shows how to save
some of that by filling the disk's empty space with zeros. Then gzip
can do some useful compression.
> Using dump won't be very useful because I won't be able to get the first 63 segments where boot info are written, I need something of lower level (obviously dd will be my friend).
A hybrid approach would be to save the first 63 blocks with dd, then use
dump for the UFS filesystems.
dd if=/dev/ad0 of=mbr.bin count=63
PS: top-posting bad, inline with trimmed irrelevancies good.
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