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Brydon Gibson
Asked: 2017-12-01 19:41:03 +0800 CST

dd or equivalent everything on a disk without dding the entire disk

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I have a very specific kernel structure on an sd card I'd like to copy and send to a friend.

I know I can simply dd the entire SD card, but the kernel is ~2GB, which wastes the other 14GB of the disk.

Is there a way to dd just the important parts?

I know I can also dd the individual partitions, but this requires setting up an equivalent partition table on the other side, so I'd prefer to do this in a way that requires only a single dd to the child disk, regardless of the complexity of creating the parent.

partitioning

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You can try Clonezilla,

    http://clonezilla.org

    • Download a Clonezilla iso file, make a CD boot disk or USB boot drive and boot from it.

    • Create a compressed image of the whole drive (a Clonezilla image is a directory with a number of files, where the big files are compressed). Clonezilla is smart enough to only clone the used blocks (and skip blocks, that are not used).

    • Test that it works to restore from the image, and when you know that it works, you can send the image to your friend.

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