<snip> > I will take what you said as a way to try dd again. I will take the > file system off the partition and let dd put it back on. Since this is > being typed on the current new F7 it is very close to working. > > Karl F. Larsen, AKA K5DI Won't change a thing. The end result will be identical. dd will produce the same results as it overwrites what is there. So whether you start with a \x00 drive, a fully formatted drive, a partially formatted, whatever - it WON'T matter. dd overwrites (as it did when you first tried it, and as it will when you try it again). You can't dd a slice of a 30 gig partition (if=/dev/sda#) onto a 10 gig partition (of=/dev/sdb#) and expect it to work. IT WILL NOT. As I stated earlier, dd copies EVERY BIT. So the partition information at the beginning of that 30 gig partition gets written at the same byte offset (assuming you didn't use a seek which you would not in this case anyhow) on the 10 gig partition which will not work. Fragments of your files could very well be beyond the 10 gig mark on that 30 gig drive. Those parts of files will not get copied. Again, you clearly do not understand dd. Trust me that it will not work as you hope it will. And if there is some messed up data on the 30 gig, well dd will copy messed up data. It copies bit for bit. It doesn't care about file systems, file sizes, file names, or any of that. If the bit is \x45 then it will copy \x45 onto the other drive even if that is a corrupt piece of data. Even if it somehow does work because as luck would have it all your allocated data is in that first 10 gig, it still will at some point puke when it tries to write a file beyond the 10 gig mark because it expects that it can seeing the partition info and inode table is for a 30 gig partition. dd is a very powerful tool. But it does not work for your scenario. Jacques B.
