On Fri, 31 Aug 2007, Timothy Murphy wrote: > Jacques B. wrote: > > > On 8/30/07, Timothy Murphy <tim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > >> Jacques B. wrote: > >> > >> > Your first part is correct. You can dd a smaller partition onto an > >> > equal or larger one. > >> > >> Are you sure you can dd onto (or rather into) a larger partition? > >> I tried that some years ago, and it led to confusion, IIRC. > > > > Yes you can. You end up with slack space at the end of the partition. > > In other words if you dd a 10 gig drive onto a 30 gig drive, you will > > have what appears to be a 10 gig drive. The remaining 20 gigs will be > > unused. > > I understand the theory. > But in my (very limited) experience, the conflicting information > on the system may cause confusion. > What for example does fdisk say? > The MBR presumably will think you have a 30 gig drive. undoubtedly, it will. beyond the (up to) 446 bytes of actual code in the MBR, there's room for a 64-byte partition table, with 4 16-byte entries. what those partitions contain is of no interest to the actual partition table, so if you create a "short" filesystem in a partition, the MBR will have no idea about that. rday p.s. what the last two bytes of the MBR contain is left as an exercise for the reader. :-) -- ======================================================================== Robert P. J. Day Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA http://crashcourse.ca ========================================================================
