To backup windows partitions (all vfat), I defragment and
then run nullfile (which fills the rest of the partition
with nulls). I then dd the partition on a linux machine,
check that I can mount and read it, do an md5sum, then gzip
the dd file. (I save the mbr, in case I need to restore a
crashed disk.)
When I do this on one linux machine, the file which is
output from the dd is the same size as the partition (about
30G), and mounts fine and can be read. All OK. The windows
partition is on a regular 3.5" hard disk on a desktop
machine,
On another linux machine (and backing up different windows
machines, with 40G laptop harddrives, which dual boot
win/linux, with 10G win partitions) the dd output file is a
little less than 6G and is the exact same size for several
windows laptops. I assume I've run into some disk geometry
limit. The partitions I'm dd'ing have <6G of windows files.
I thought the 6G dd file must be truncated and unreadable,
but when I mount the 6G dd file, I see the expected
partition size (10G) in the mount table, du shows the right
numbers for the number of bytes used/freee and the files in
the partition all look OK.
I've got a 6G dd file which mounts as a correctly readable
10G partition. I guess I've got a valid copy of the windows
partition. However I'm worried that if I need to restore
that the wrong sized partition will be written.
Anyone know why the dd copy of size 6G is not the same size
as the 10G partition?
Thanks Joe
--
Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
jmack (at) wm7d (dot) net - azimuthal equidistant map
generator at http://www.wm7d.net/azproj.shtml
Homepage http://www.austintek.com/ It's GNU/Linux!
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