Tiny Core Extensions > TCE Tips & Tricks

Creating a partition image with dd / ddrescue

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Rich:
Hi Fakir
Enter:

--- Code: ---dd --help
--- End code ---
This will tell you whether  sparse  is a supported option.

patrikg:
When using dd... it's not mounting the disc with correct filesystem and take file by file.
Just take the hole thing.
Why not just compact the image...
And remember always to use conv=notrunc,noerror to records the image correctly.

Fakir:
@ 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 ;) )
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.. ;)

Misalf:
It's true that the old FAT filesystem does not support files greater than 4 GB.
In order to store a files bigger than 4GB, you need to use anther filesystem. NTFS or EXT2/3/4 will do.

Fakir:
Ok, I'll try to get the partition's size smaller than 4.3 GB…
 
But: how would you explain the fact that dd and ddrescue created a sparse img file that had the size of the whole original partition instead of only the files contained on it.

In case I accomplish to shrink the partition down: How can I reliably avoid that dd / ddrescue want to create a file having the size of the whole partition?

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