Clone A Bootable CF Card With Multiple Partitions And Copy To Bigger Drive

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?

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

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?

For my cell phone, I used an app named link2sd with a SD card. Because the current 8GB card is filled up, I got a 32GB card to take its place. For the link2sd app, the SD card is partitioned into 2 partitions. First partition is formatted to fat32 and the 2nd one is ext2 format. What is the proper way to copy content of these partitions to the new card? Thanks in advance.

I created a persistent USB thumb drive boot with LUKS for drive encryption (250 MB /boot and then 7.5 GB ext3 root). There's no swap partition because this is just to store some private files.

I want to make two or three copies of this thumb drive to store apart in case one gets destroyed/lost.

When I am booted from that thumb drive, can I plug in a same sized drive and just do a

Code:

dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sdc

command to make a copy of itself to another thumb drive without booting to another host OS? This way when I make changes to one (such as to update the OS, apps, or data), I could then just copy the entire thumb drive over to the other two while still booted in the original USB.

Or would I effectively have to shut down, boot to my normal host OS (or other), and then copy the thumb drives when not booted into them.

i have windows 8.1 and ubuntu 14.04 ....now wen i try to access a drive of windows in ubuntu it says failed to mount.
then i used "sudo ntfsfix /dev/sda4" for mounting the drives ......it worked for all drives except the E drive (not the system drive).
it gives error windows is hibernated , shutdown windows.
I shutdown my windows properly but still that particular drive refuses to mount..
any solns?

Lots of posts on internet about flash drives ending up read-only in Linux after using on a windows or mac systme. Gather it is a problem with incorrectly ejecting or the ejection being poorly done.

Usually I can go back to the box and re-eject and all is well. This time even GParted and the resident fedora 21 Disk Utility programs did not even see the drive (which Was visible under "files").

Using disk utility on the "offending" machine, it seems there were many files that were truncated (due to some eject issue? Note the ejection was done "according to Hoyle" ); regardless the flash drive was still read-only. Howeverk, re-trying GParted, which now recognized the drive, the drive was unmounted checked. Some repair was necessary. Currently, I can read, write and copy within the drive.

However, the drive itself is still only read-only for all but the owner (which is not even root). I cannot copy any file to the flash drive. Chmod does nothing (no matter if root or other user tries). I suppose I should be satisfied for the access there is, but if anyone has any more suggestions, it would be great.

Thanks in advance for any info/interest

Hello!

TL;DR: Deleted Linux partition from Windows. Stuck at Grub rescue prompt.

I'm sorry to trouble you guys, because I'm an idiot.

So I'm wanting to dual-boot Kalilinux and Windows 8.
I went through the steps such as creating a bootable USB, changing the
boot order and so on. I get into Kali, start Gparted and try to partition stuff.

I'm far from an expert, so I wasn't sure what to do. Long-story short, I
didn't seem to get Kali installed correctly, due to something with an EFI
drive being required. So I boot into windows and then stupidly, because it said in the guide,try to "uninstall" Kali by removing it's partition, inside Win8 haha... So I did.

Now I simply get the Grub rescue command prompt when I boot from the same
USB and I have no idea how to fix it. I've run bootrec.exe/fixmbr in Windows haha,
for what it's worth. However Grub can't find any partition it says.

In windows, I have like... 2-3 Recovery partitions. Does anyone know how to remove
them??? I've tried to clear as much as I can, besides the C drive and Auxillary D drive.

Any advice would be very appreciated.

I have multiple computers to install Linux onto.

Some of my computers do not have DVD drives.

I want to boot Linux from C:, not the USB drive.

Do I download the ISO onto a C: drive.
Copy the image to the USB with the image mover.

My confusion is that this all seems to make a boot-able USB drive.

How do I install OpenSuse without having a DVD and end up booting from the C: drive?

Do I first have to boot from the USB?

(BTW I'm running Xubuntu 15.04)

I'm starting to understand Luckybackup. And gold_finger said:

Quote:
Assuming your Xubuntu filesystem is Ext4, example of doing initial backup would be something like this:

* Spare USB with large partition formatted as Ext4 and labeled "BACKUPS"
I know the EXT4 is more friendly to Linux but all my flash drives are FAT32 (and I'll be backing up to those flash drives) and I'd really like to keep them that way (because sometimes I do plug them into Windows machines--and I know FAT32 works with both Windows and Linux). So is there any reason I would have to use Ext4 and not FAT32 in backing up stuff in LuckyBackup?

I confess to great ignorance about the difference between the EXT and FAT formats. Like if I do format a flash drive to EXT 4 and want to plug the flash drive into a Windows computer it just doesn't work? Like, what's the advantage to using EXT4 then if FAT 32 works with Linux and Windows? What are the disadvantages to using EXT4?

Thanks.