> And I want to rip out just "a" to write to another disk. First, its > imperative to have the fdisk setup correctly, though for a flash device, > creating a whole partition on 3 works well, (fdisk -e sd0, e 3, A6, > follow prompts). > > Once you've got your partition created, remember to dd out the first 63 > sectors along with the size of the partition. So you'd do "dd > if=/dev/wd0 bs=512 of=wd0a.img count=819504" and write it out with "dd > if=wd0a.img of=/dev/sd0c". > ... > To copy out the "d" partition for example, its as simple as doing "dd > if=/dev/wd0 of=wd0d.img bs=512 skip=1639008". The "skip" flag size is > calculated by looking at the size of a+b+63 (63 being the initial offset > of "a"). > > Hope this helps clear up some things. Also, "bs=512" isn't needed, I > just use it in my scripts to tell other people who may use it later that > the default blocksize is 512 in case they're not clued up enough to know > this.
Wow, thanks for the detailed break down, that is great. Just a quick follow up, are you saying that I should not increase the bs size, ie from bs=512 (the default if nothing is specified) to bs=20m? I ask this b/c using a bs=20m speeds up the writing to my usb-cf reader significantly (like 10 minutes rather then 4 hours). Thanks again, Gordo. -- http://www.gordonturner.ca