Backing up with dd, and creating a file system on a new drive.

[Karl F. Larsen]

Ray Parrish wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I just got my new 500 GB drive, and am excited about being able to back 
> up my 160 GB old drive. Since I am new to the LInux camp, I need to know 
> how to set up the new drive, and how to use dd to image the 160 GB drive 
> to the 500 GB drive.

	Hi Ray, you need a liveCD from any of the latest Ubuntu 
versions. It will have dd in it and also the partitioner.

	First connect your USB hard drive and see where it shows up. 
It is often at /media/. The whole address to your target might 
be like /media/disk/whole-computer and the whole computer 
source will be /dev/sda.

	Here is the form of the dd command:

$ dd if=/dev/sda of=/media/disk/whole-computer 
bs=2048conv=notrunc

Yours may be a little different but it should look about like 
the above.

73 Karl






> 
> After I do back up the small drive, and create partitions beyond what dd 
> writes there, will there be a problem with using dd to rewrite the back 
> up at a later date with the new partitions beyond the backup partitions?
> 
> Can I use gparted to create an ntfs volume of the drive first, then use 
> dd to image the small one, or can I run dd on the unformatted drive 
> first to create the backup partitions?
> 
> Thanks, Ray Parrish
> 


-- 

	Karl F. Larsen, AKA K5DI
	Linux User
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