Pádraig wrote: > What is your exact dd command please, and destination file system.
I was running KNOPPIX 5.3.1; the source was a harddisk partition, and the target was a file in an ext2 filesystem on a harddisk in an USB device mounted on /media/sdb2/: $ dd if=/dev/sda5 of=/media/sdb2/backups/sda5 bs=1G > I'm a bit confused as ftruncate is not called unless you specify a > non zero seek= but that seems a bit weird from your described usage. hmm, so maybe it has not actually been the truncate() which took so long but the fd_reopen() using O_TRUNC. Have a nice day, Berny