[Discuss] Knoppix to the rescue

[pw]

Murray Strome wrote:
> Before I used dd, I first made some partitions on my external USB drive 
> that were essentially the same size as the ones on my laptop. 


If you dd from the device into a file
you don't need to make a storage partition. This allows
you to name the binary file something identifiable
rather than trying to remember what /dev/sdb1 was
a duplicate of. You can also mount the files using loop
if you need to dig around in your backups or diff them.

ie:

dd if=/dev/hdxn of=filename.bin

Then you can have all your backups on one
big EXT2 drive.You may also need to make sure that you can make
files big enough to store a complete partiton file
on the drive. Make sure you format so that you have 64
bit file size capabilities.

ie:

mke2fs -b 4096

Using ulimit before the dd command ensures, on some systems,
that you can make a file over 2 Gigs.

ie:

ulimit -f unlimited

dd if=/dev/yada of=filename.bin

Peter