Re: [cobalt-users] dd command

[Jan P Tietze <jptietze@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I do think so; I would just encourage you to not do this on a live
system, ie. one where the hard disk that you are going to back up is
mounted read-write; or better still, connect the RaQ hard disk to
another linux system, then do a backup of the partition table and the
partitions of the RaQ disk. Of course, it might not be that easy to
re-create the partition table on a hard disk with different geometry,
but the partition content itself should be fine; at least you could loop
mount the saved partition files, re-create partitions of the same or a
larger size, and then do a safe copy of the loop mounted partition. I
have successfully created dd backups of all my partitions and the
partition table, then gzipped the files and stored them on an
"emergency" CD. This would even allow using a larger or faster hard disk
instead of the one Cobalt supplied.

Btw I think steps 2 & 6 would be unneccessary. At this point, you have
already written the partition table. In any case, this procedure would
probably only work on the same kind of hard disk, in all other cases, I
would probably recommend manually creating partitions, then doing loop
mounts; this would lose quota information though if I am right, so maybe
using the ext2fs extension utility would be more intelligent and require
less work afterwards.

Jan

Mike Fritsch wrote:

> Dad
>
> I did some research on the dd command. Here is what I came up with:
>
> First  : backup the partition table ==> dd if=/dev/hda
> of=/mnt/backup/partition.img bs=1024 count=1
> Second : backup the first partition ==> dd if=/dev/hda1
> of=/mnt/backup/part1.img
> Third  : backup the third partition ==> dd if=/dev/hda3
> of=/mnt/backup/part3.img (not hda2 ==> swap)
> Four   : backup the fourth partition ==> dd if=/dev/hda4
> of=/mnt/backup/part4.img
>
> To restore :
> 1°)dd if=/mnt/backup/partition.img of=/dev/hda
> 2°)fdisk /dev/hda , then just type "w"
> 3°)dd if=/mnt/backup/part1.img of=/dev/hda1
> 4°)dd if=/mnt/backup/part1.img of=/dev/hda3
> 5°)dd if=/mnt/backup/part1.img of=/dev/hda4
> 6°)Don't forget to active /dev/hda1
>
> What do you think? Would it work?
>
> Mike
>
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