On 19 September 2016 at 17:18, Robert McWilliam <r...@allmail.net> wrote: > On Mon, 19 Sep 2016, at 14:21, Colin Law wrote: >> I do a fair amount of work with SD cards and use dd to create an image >> for backup or for burning onto other cards. If I burn an image from an >> 8GB card onto a 16GB card then I get a card which is only half used. >> If I then make an image from that one then I get a 16GB image (of >> which only 8GB or less is partitioned) which is larger than it needs >> to be and also if I burn that onto another 8GB card then it fails as >> the card is not large enough (or at least it says it has failed, the >> card will in fact be ok). > > You can copy a single partition by pointing dd at the partition rather > than the device, e.g. sda1 rather than sda. I expect that would achieve > the same thing as giving dd offset and size that you can get from fdisk > (but less likely to get those wrong). > > Neither approach will give you an image that you can (reliably) put back > onto a card with (just) dd. It won't include the partition table.
Is not the partition table in the space before the first partition? So in the example I posted where I had Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type /dev/sdb1 8192 137215 129024 63M c W95 FAT32 (LBA) /dev/sdb2 137216 4233215 4096000 2G 83 Linux is not the partition table in sectors 0 to 8191? So if I copy sectors 0 to 2333215 that should include the partition table and all the partitions. Is that not correct? > It > will work if the destination card is partitioned the same as the source > and you write to the same offset, or if you've got a partition the same > size and you update the offset to hit that, but otherwise you'd need to > update the partition table (and other partitions) to make an > appropriately sized gap for it and then write to that. > > I think it's better to look at what you're trying to do, and see if dd > is the right tool. I can understand wanting to use dd for archiving or > backing up cards since it'll also catch things that have been deleted or > lost to filesystem corruption that you can then (try to) recover once > you've noticed that something is missing. I'm less convinced it's a good > idea going the other way; it causes the problems you're seeing when > sizes aren't the same and it means you're writing more to the cards than > you need to. I think you'd be better to mount the image file and copy > the files across to the card. To do it that way I believe I would have to write a script to pick up the partition info from the original card, mount and copy the files in each partition, and save the partition info with the files. Then to restore it I would need a script to re-partition the new card and copy the files across to each partition. Colin -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
