On Saturday 25 April 2009 12:32:14 pm Stan Goodman wrote:
At 15:31:29 on Saturday Saturday 25 April 2009, "Carlos E. R." ...
Notice that if you dd a partition to another, and say, source is 1 GiB, and destination is, say, 2 GiB, the end result is a filesystem that "thinks" it has only 1 GiB and wastes the other 1 GiB.
In other words, it ignores the file system that was there before the copying began, and formats according to whatever is on the source partition? And stops when the copying is complete, leaving the rest unformatted? Very bad, as I am thinking of enlarging the /home partition.
If the situation is the reverse, dd will stop at 1 GiB (1), but the resulting filesystem will be broken, because it thinks it has 2 GiB.
=;-/8
In both cases dd simply copies input sector by sector, byte by byte, to output, whatever that is file, or another device. It will create exact copy of source partition. It has no idea about formatting, as that is above level dd works. The file system idea of own size is possible to change and avoid space waste if partition is larger, or file system driver attempts to write beyond partition boundary. As file system driver is part of the kernel, it can happen that it can write over next partition on the disk and spoil the joy.
As you are copying files, you should be better using a file copy tool, like rsync. Or even midnight commander. Or you could use clonezilla.
Why is any one of these better than the simple cp, which knows very well how to copy files?
I used cp to copy whole systems from one place to another, and only problem happened when it went from reiserfs to ext3. Usually I would use Midnight Commander from another installation, or Live CD. If you have 1 GB it should be more then enough, as live system will take 2-3 hundred MB, and the rest can be used to copy files. -- Regards, Rajko http://news.opensuse.org/category/people-of-opensuse/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org