<snip> > So DD copy must have ruined the file system I put on. <snip> > > Karl F. Larsen, AKA K5DI You obviously misunderstood what dd does. dd will overwrite everything (so yes will overwrite the file system table at the beginning of the partition in addition to everything else). It is a bit by bit copy. You can use dd to copy a file to a new file which will do so on an existing file system (must be on an existing file system). However when running dd against a physical device (i.e. /dev/sda) or partition (i.e. /dev/sda5) with a destination of another physical device or partition, then the destination device/partition does not have to be formatted prior to doing this. dd is copying everything (and I mean everything - partition table, inode table, file slack, unallocated space - everything) thus resulting in an exact bit by bit duplicate of that device onto a new one (or partition onto a new partition). Hence why I said I didn't think it would work to only grab 10 gig of a 30 gig partition using dd with if= being your device/partition and your of= being a device/partition. Now if your of= was a file name on a mounted file system, that would be very different (wouldn't do what you want to do, just an aside to this topic). You can dd a thumb drive to a file on your system (i.e. if=/dev/sda of=/home/myname/thumb.dd) and then using the loop back option mount thumb.dd (image of a block device), make changes to it (add/remove/modify the content), unmount it and then dd it back onto your thumb drive and the thumb drive would now have all those changes. You can even use dd to create an empty thumb drive. I've done this in order to create a scenario for a class and then dd'ed it onto a bunch of thumb drives to that everybody would be working from the exact same thumb drive. But I am really straying of topic now. Your issue was moving your Fedora 7 partition to a new partition - not something directly on topic seeing achieving this has nothing to do with Fedora but is generic to Linux, however nevertheless dealing with a Fedora system so sufficiently on topic to be asked on this list. Jacques B.
