How To Duplicate A SD Card With 2 Partitions Under Debian

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 all,

As you can probably tell I am new to Linux and new to the forum, I am using Kali and Mint both as live Linux environments on USB drives, all is good and I am finding my way around, the reason for the post is that I need to copy 15 CF cards that have multiple partitions, Windows isn't really an option as it can only see one partition on a removable drive, so here goes with Linux.

The CF cards contain Windows Embedded XP in one partition and a separate partition for user data which isn't protected, not that the contents matter, only the fact that it is bootable with multiple partitions, the object is to upgrade the old 2gb cards to 4gb cards to add an additional program on the embedded drive, but they are both full.

as long as I can copy both partitions over the partition size doesn't matter as I can resize that if necessary, but I need both partitions to copy over to the new drive.

I have read that dd command is the way to go but cant find much on multiple partitions which display in Linux as two drives, so how do I go about this, any pointers

Ideally I would like to automate the process as this is something that we could end up doing on a regular basis, I have seen a USB drive that was plugged into a PC and through a basic GUI allowed you to copy a HDD but I don't know If that would do both partitions, something for the future?

Hi all,

I have a device which has a Compact Flash card and a SSD. The file system is split so that everything except "/home" is stored on the compact flash card.

On the compact flash I am experiencing partition table corruption due to power loses when writing to the CF card.

One solution to this is to move everything onto the solid state drive, but as this is also flash memory - is the rish of corruption still the same as using the CF card?

Thanks in advance for any replies.

Hi,
I made some little applications with qt creator and i wanted to run them on an embedded linux board (linux 2.6.24). To transfer the files i use a SD card. If i move the applications to "/bin" after having mounted the SD card and then "chmod a+x" them then i have no problem running them.
But if i mount the SD card and try to run the applications directly in the folder where i mount it i have an error : "Permission denied". Also when using the command "ls" i notice that if i keep the files in the mounting folder and try to "chmod a+x" them, the modification don't happen. They stay "greyed" and don't go "green". (I don't know if this color code is a standart for linux terminal but maybe this could help you understand the problem).
When mounting the SD card i use the command :
Code:

mount -t vfat /dev/mmcblk0p1 /mnt/SD

So the files are located in /mnt/SD.

Am i missing something or is it not possible to run something like that ?

EDIT :
I tried "mount -t vfat -o umask=0000 /dev/mmcblk0p1 /mnt/SD" to chnage how i am mounting the SD card.

Still "Permission Denied".

With "ls -l" i can see that the permissions are staying :
-rw-rw-rw-

Even if i try something like "chmod 777".

It seems to be a problem related to the fact that the sd card is formated as fat32 but it must stay like that.

OK, so I'm really new at this. And I just figured out how to download google earth. But then when I went to open it, it sadi that my graphics card was insufficient to run the graphics. Soooooo

1. What the heck IS a graphics card? Is it a piece of hardware or software?
2. How do I find out what kind I have?
3. How do I update it?

Thanks! I don't know what I'd do without ya!

Hi everybody,

I am trying to set up my sd card with an embedded ubuntu I build lately according to this linkhttps://eewiki.net/display/linuxonar...-Ubuntu14.04.1 (Topic Setup microSD/SD card).
I am doing this on Ubuntu running in VirtualBox. I am quite new to linux and barely understand the command that causes the first warning. Here is what happened:

ubuntu@ubuntu-VirtualBox:~$ sudo sfdisk --in-order --Linux --unit M ${DISK} <<-__EOF__ --force
> 1,12,0xE,*
> ,,,-
> __EOF__
Checking that no-one is using this disk right now ...
BLKRRPART: Invalid argument
OK

Disk /dev/sdc1: 1019 cylinders, 246 heads, 62 sectors/track

sfdisk: ERROR: sector 0 does not have an msdos signature
/dev/sdc1: unrecognized partition table type
Old situation:
No partitions found
New situation:
Units = mebibytes of 1048576 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0

Device Boot Start End MiB #blocks Id System
/dev/sdc1p1 * 1 12 12 12288 e W95 FAT16 (LBA)
/dev/sdc1p2 13 7591 7579 7760896 83 Linux
/dev/sdc1p3 0 - 0 0 0 Empty
/dev/sdc1p4 0 - 0 0 0 Empty
Successfully wrote the new partition table

Re-reading the partition table ...
BLKRRPART: Invalid argument

If you created or changed a DOS partition, /dev/foo7, say, then use dd(1)
to zero the first 512 bytes: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/foo7 bs=512 count=1
(See fdisk(8).)
ubuntu@ubuntu-VirtualBox:~$ sudo mkfs.vfat -F 16 ${DISK}p1 -n BOOT
mkfs.fat 3.0.26 (2014-03-07)
/dev/sdc1p1: No such file or directory


So after I entered "sudo sfdisk --in-order --Linux --unit M ${DISK} <<-__EOF__ --force
> 1,12,0xE,*
> ,,,-
> __EOF__ "
everything looked fine since it sad that it created the partition sdc1p1 etc. but as soon as I want to format this partition with "sudo mkfs.vfat -F 16 ${DISK}p1 -n BOOT" it tells me that there is no partition called /dev/sdc1p1

I would be very gratefull if somebody could help me out on this. I thought about trying a different tutorial but they look really really different so I tried to stick to the one that worked well for me so far.

Thank you very much!

Regards,

Lenni

I have a debian OS on a partition on my hard disk (sda1).
There was no sound because the ati rs880/radeon 4200 sound card needed drivers which were only in the debian 'non-free' version'.
So I added the non-free version to my install and also had to make a change to the GRUB bootloader file.
After that, I got sound.

Now I've installed a new debian distro to my second partition - sda2.
This time I ensured I installed the debian non-free version.
But I'm having trouble installing the drivers for the sound card.

I go into Synaptic package manager to install the relevant drivers and it gives me an error message:
Code:

Configuring libfglrx - install Fglrx driver despite unsupported graphics card?

I'm not sure what that means because I want the drivers for my sound card - not graphics.
When I press the 'Help' button, it says:
Code:

This system has a graphics card which is no longer handled by the Fglrx driver...
The above card requires either the non-free legacy Fgrlx driver 
(package fgrlx-legacy-driver) or the free Radeon driver (package xserver-xorg-video-radeon).

This is fine because I can just install the 'free Radeon driver'.

But the Help message then says:
Code:

Before the Radeon driver can be used you must remove Fglrx configuration from xorg.conf 
(and xorg.conf.d/)
Note that switching to the free Radeon driver requires the fglrx-driver package to be purged (not just removed).

So now I don't know what to do. Has anyone had this error message?
I know I can enable sound and have no problems with the graphics card because that's what happened with my original install on sda1.

But with the install on sda2, I don't know how to approach this problem.
Can anyone help please?

I have a machine with two drives a Compact Flash card (CF) and a Solid State Drive (SSD). Recently I have been experiencing failures of both the SSD and the CF.

When I sent these back to the manufacturer for analysis, they reported that the SSDs and CDs are healthy - but that it appears that the partition table has become corrupt.

Using a Kickstart I created my Linux machine with the partitions split over the CF (to hold the operating system) and the SSD (to hold my data):
/ on the CF
/boot on the CD
/usr on the CF
/home on the SSD
Would Unix have an issue with using the CF to boot and run the operating system and using the SSD to store files?
Has anyone experienced any issues of this kind?

Hi

I am very suprised! I previously had a Windows 7 desktop, dual boot with Windows Server 2012 R2. I didn't care much about 2012 R2, so I went with a Debian server on another computer.

I wanted to triple boot my computer, so I looked at my BIOS to see if my computer has UEFI support, but it doesnt, so I am not able to boot to GPT. One decision lead to another, and I decided not to install Hackintosh. As part of this process, I had converted it to GPT, and then back to MBR when installing Windows 8.1 Pro. Everything went well.

When I went to install Debian 7, it was not recognizing anything on that drive. I found out it was a backup GUID partition table left over. I used fixparts found on rodsbooks.com, and I fixed the disk partition table.

Now this is where things get weird. Before installing, I created a primary partition for /, and an extended partition with 5 logical partitions inside it. I installed Debian 7 from a live install DVD, and I manually created the partitions. I created a 4GB /, 16GB /usr, 4GB /var, and 64GB /home. Then I left a bunch of free space (~145GB) and then 16GB swap space. (I have 8GB ram, and I plan to hibernate sometimes).

After a successful installation, installation of packages, reboots, and frustration with PCI card problems, I rebooted to Windows 8.1.

Upon opening diskpart gui, I was greeted with the picture attached.

WHAT IS GOING ON?

A little embarassed to even ask this, but...

In the last few evenings, a typical Linux session has been creating a root file system on an SD card, mounted on /mnt/sd2 (partition2 of card). At the same time watching a movie from the HD, mounted at /mnt/HD.

I was wondering if everything going through /mnt might be slowing things down at all. The answer should be 'no' since everything is mounted to 'root' and that doesn't seem to be a problem, but maybe /mnt is handled differently than root.

Just ran an experiment with 'top' and seeing what is happening with mplayer and debian bootrap:

Code:

5562 walter    20   0 62980  23m 9.8m R  38.0  2.7   4:01.75 mplayer
 1852 root      20   0 32048  12m 3728 S   3.0  1.4   2:08.92 Xorg
 2020 walter    20   0  276m  14m   9m S   2.0  1.7   1:32.03 gnome-mplayer
 2070 root      20   0     0    0    0 D   1.0  0.0   0:25.22 mmcqd/0

Can't really tell much from this, except that 'mmcqd/0' must be the bootstrap program unpacking things in the sd card. It kind of begs dumb question number 2: the unpacking process is crawling down the terminal screen, why is it not using more cpu to speed itself up? Must be the sd card can only accept writing to it at that speed, average about 1 second per package? Can't pull the card out at the moment, but pretty shure it's class 10, although suspiciously cheap from Eb.