@ Rich
With dd (coreutils) the sparse operator works.
@ Patrikg
The background of that procedure is to have an image that can be used in virtualbox. I'm not sure if virtualbox is able to handle a gz file..?
How do you mean this: dd isn't mounting the correct filesystem? The problem isn't limited to dd, the othr programs I tried ended up in the same.
As far as I could see in the meanwhile, it's actually due to the file size restriction in fat 32 that I cannot get the whole partition content into one big file. So obviously I now have the two possibilities:
1. I tell dd / ddrescue / partimage to split the image into several smaller files (but then I would get the problem how to merge them on that fat 32 hdd into a fil that is bigger than 4.3 GB, so this isn't a real possibility
![Wink ;)](https://forum.tinycorelinux.net/Smileys/default/wink.gif)
)
2. I get it handled that virtualbox can process a compressed gz img file.
I wonder how others have accomplished the same issue: creating a partition image and loading into a VM - I can't imagine that this issue is a rare case. Perhaps it's just because they're not using a fat 32 formatted hdd..
![Wink ;)](https://forum.tinycorelinux.net/Smileys/default/wink.gif)