I just had an unusual thing happen. I was dd'ing a SATA device(120GB) into an image file in ext2 of a 320GB drive using the Helix Live CD. Here's what I used
dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/mnt/320gb/dd.img bs=4k
It ran fine for a while, then started throwing errors. It's then that I noticed that it had gone PAST 120GB and was at 200GB and counting! How could this be? I stopped it and check my dd command, and no, I didn't copy the wrong way around(from the 320GB to the 120GB. The 120GB drive is part of a RAID0 set. Could this make dd "think" that the sda1 partition was bigger than it was?
Just curious.
A
AC,
I noticed you had specified "sda1", meaning the first primary partition on device sda. Was this the intended method to acquire that partition only? Not seeing what you have but I wonder what dd might try to do if there wasn't the right type of partition on the drive, for example and extended partition only.
Steve
Steve,
I dd'ed the sda and it went fine. Running an fdisk -l showed that the partition on the 120GB was in fact 239GB. So it appears that dd uses the partition info when a partition number is specified.
A
Hi,
I'm a bit blur here. How come a 120GB drive can be 239Gb for partition? Is this drive using RAID some sort?
Thanks.