[OLUG] dd

[Dave Burchell]

brian at bstc.net says:
> 
> or....
> 
> 
> mount -o loop /path/to/image

Er, right, this will tell you if you have a good filesystem and let you
poke around in it and check that everything is there.  In most cases
this would be what you want.

However, mesc has been saying he wants to restore his MS Windows system
when it breaks.  Did he actually get _all_ of the files he needs to
restore the system?  Can he put them back so Windows can be booted?
Were there any problems with weird filenames; any Microsoft gremlins
hiding in that image file?

For example, I recently used GNU tar to back up an NTFS partition
mounted under Linux.  Verification showed that I was not getting all of
the files on the filesystem.  Everything looked fine, but some file or
directory was thwarting tar and it was giving me only the portion of
the filesystem from before it came to that point.  If I had not
verified the backup I could have lost my user's data.

Testing is the one sure way to answer these questions.  Assuming that
everything worked is the path to failure, destruction, and death (or
worse!).

If mesc only wanted to verify that all of the files were there I would
suggest using "mount" as Brian said above and using "diff -r" on it and
the original filesystem (also mounted).

> Brian Roberson
> brian at bstc.net 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: burchell [mailto:burchell at inetnebr.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, April 19, 2000 10:41 PM
> To: olug
> Cc: burchell
> Subject: FW: Re: [OLUG] dd
> 
> 
> Sounds good, but remember, test your backup.  Make sure you can
> read/restore from this file the way you want to.  How many horror 
> stories
> have we all heard about untested backups being unreadable or blank?
> 
> Ideally, you could test with a spare hard drive of the same (or slightly
> larger) size.  Swap the current drive with the spare and restore your
> Windows system from your backup media.  (I know, we don't all have spare
> drives...)
> 
> mesc says:
> > 
> > I finally got my windows ISO made using mkisofs -o -a
> > /usr/bin/window95.img /mnt/win.After it was finished running it said 
> 672
> > mb copied to /usr/bin/window95.img (the size of my windows dir)so it
> > must have done it right.Thank you all for your help.
> > 
> >             Thanks again,Gary Martin.
> > 
> > 
> > 
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-- 
Dave Burchell                                          40.49'N, 96.41'W
Free your mind and your software will follow.              402-467-1619
http://incolor.inetnebr.com/burchell/                  burchell at acm.org     

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