Backing Up With Dd

Hi, all, I am new to the forum and quite new to Linux, I am running Mint and Kali from a USB drive, all is going well with with the software and I am starting to find my way around it.

So, now to my question, I have 15 machines which all run from a CF card and the card has multiple partitions and is a Windows Embedded XP, not that the operating system makes any difference, I need to upgrade all the CF cards from 2gb to 4gb, so unfortunately Windows isn't an option to use to copy the drives as it doesn't recognise multiple partitions on a removable drive, so I cant just remove the drive, clone it and fit the new one.

What I need is a method of cloning the drive completely with both partitions, I have read about dd but cant seem to see anything about doing this with multiple partitions, as Linux sees it as two drives when I plug it in, how can I use dd or anything else to clone the drive which is bootable and has two partitions?

At some point I would like to automate the process as I could have many of these machines/drives to upgrade, is there a way to write a program that will automatically back up the drives from a USB drive and then reinstall it, I have seen this done before but I am not sure if this method did the whole drive, just the main drive or all partitions?

Hi Everyone,

We are using Dell Power Edge R510 server as a central storage in Linux network. I have configured RAID6 on 10 near-line SAS hard disks. Using NFS i have exported one directory and mounted it on other machines.

Recently we are facing one problem, when anyone read/write big file (2-3GB)from NFS drive,others feel very slow access to that drive. Sometime we can't open simple text file till complete read/write process.

I have remounted NFS drive but still problem as it is.

Can anyone help me to solve this problem.

hey guys, I understand how dd works. Ive been researching on it and I see that
if="" is the source of what I want to copy
of="" is that target that I want to send the back up to

so, what i am trying to do it copy my hard drive from saturn server: /dev/sda1 over SSH to my backup server skyline.

so [saturn harddrive /dev/sda1] -----backup---> [skyline:/backup/directory]


this is the command I am using
sudo ssh willc86@skyline "dd if=/dev/sda1 " | dd of=/backup/saturn.img

however, it is saying failed to open /dev/sda1/ : permission denied and I am runnign as root. any idea why?

thanks a bunch guys!

The local provider has given us a fixed IP so we can have a web server for the car club's domain.

I will be using a Dell 2400 desktop computer with a 1.8 GHz Pentium 4 processor, 1 GB RAM, 40 GB hard drive and a DVD drive.

I want to use command line, not GUI and FTP the club's car pictures from my home.

My only Linux experience was sparse use of Red Hat 2.05 which is now 15 years old and not secure.

If the structure and folders are the same, Can I use CentOS 5.11 or 6.6

Thank you,
people call me Cousin

I've just started tinkering with Linux and have a question about installing it to my current machine.

I'm running Win 7 Pro and have installed Oracle VM Virtual Box on the C:\ drive which is a 256 GB SSD. I want to create a 15 GB virtual hard drive on a second internal hard drive that has more space on it, and install Zorin 9.1 to it. Currently my C: drive is about 60% full and I'd rather not fill it up past that.

So my question is: Can I run Zorin off of a hard drive other than the C: drive?

Thanks for your consideration.

Dave

Hello everyone,

I recently had an issue where I lost my whole backup server due to an electrical overload causing my server to literally explode and fried all 4 of my terabyte drives.... needless to say, I have no more backups because of this, and everywhere I read about backups said that setting up a raid array would allow me to keep good backups.... boy did I learn this lesson the hard way in needing to have some sort of external backup option, which brings me to this post and my questions:

I'm using Ubuntu 14.04 LTS server on an older Dell Poweredge 600sc, and I was thinking of using WD Passport 1Tb external drives to be used as my "offsite" backup option. I don't have a lot of data, and my current backup schedule is only a weekly backup, so thinking that if I have two of these passport drives so that I can have one drive offsite and one attached to the server, and rotate them every 4 weeks so as not to loose all my data.

Here's my question: Ideally, I would love to just be able to unplug the current drive, plug in the new drive and have everything work. However, I don't see this actually working, but if there's a way to do this, that would be totally awesome.... ;-)

So, realistically, I know I will have to unmount the one drive, unplug it, then plug in the new drive and mount it on the system. Is there a way to mount this to the same mount point automatically so that I don't have to rewrite my backup script each time I swap drives out so that the backups go to the same mount point? Or will the UUID's get messed up each time I do this?

Hopefully this makes sense and an easy solution can be found to accomodate this idea.....

Thanks again for all your help. This site is awesome for newbies such as myself........

Mikey

On my current system I have drives sda, sdb, sdc; 1TB, 1.5TB, 1.5TB respectively.
SATA drive a is where I installed the OS and the other SATA drives b and c are from an old system that was linux software mirror, something I was using to play and learn. Now I have added b and c to my current system and before doing so I stopped the mirror and removed the partitions. I added the drives to my current system and used cfdisk to create one partition on each and then mounted the new drives. I then run ls and I see bin/....etc. listed in the new drive. Is this normal or when I create the new drive partitions should I use Logical instead of Primary.

Is there a way to get my drives back to non raid that I have missed doing?

Thanks

Hey guys,

From researching, I came across 3 different methods to do this; however, just need some recommendations.

my drive @ 150GB is out of memeory

-I have a spare 150GB memory that I can add for free. can I combine the 2 drives? or use a raid 5?

-but a new 1TB hard drive, use clonezilla to back it up and restore it back on the 1TB

-add the 2nd 150gb HD and use LVM?

what do you guys recommend

Hey Newbie Here

Have A Acer C720 Chomebook With An Upgraded SSD 128GB, Run Ubuntu Threw Cruton But Dont Know To Much

Have Legacy Boot And Really Into Messing Around

Looking For A Bootable Virtual Machine OS, What I Mean Is A Small Operating System With Enough To Support Hardware And Qemu Or Better Installation, Size Dose'nt Matter And Hopefully Something Already Put Together But I Can Understand Instructons

I Once Found A Tinycore Iso That Was Bootable And Booted Straight Into A Partition-er - A Bootable Partition-er And All Around Bootable Disk Management Os..... I Love The Idea Of Bootable Software, It Was Only Like 40+ Megs

Ive Looked All Around Google And Couldent Find Anything

Tried To Make one Myself And Cant Understand How To Put Together Something Like That

Even Just A Terminal That Boots Qemu With The Right Command Or Something That Compares To A Bootable Tinycore Program

Thanks, Open To Better Newer Ideas , And Anything Helps

Using a Kingston 4GB datatraveler for drive creation
Created using amd64 1.1.0a of the Kali ISO verified from Kali.org
Drive created using Ubuntu 14.04 on a Dell Latitude E5500

dd seems to create the drive with no errors. The drive boots to the error. Hard reboot into Ubuntu to search for solution has led me to a long series of issues that I have been trying to correct.

A possible fix for the failed to load error is to copy the file to the root of the USB drive (/dev/sdb1). Drive is created with a hidden HPFS/ NTFS fs. 0x17. Changed FS to HPFS/NTS (0x07). Drive now mounts, but when attempting to copy onto drive, I get an error that the file system is read only.

I try to correct the issue using nautilus and the properties menu. It does not allow me to change the view only to read/write even though it shows me as the owner.

I think maybe a command line thing would work, or who knows what else. Maybe an fstab entry? I am continuing to search the web, and hope to work this out.

Any help would be appreciated.