I have seen advice in many places that dd should not be performed on a mounted partition and I followed that because it seems intuitively correct it does seem rather like trying to sketch yourself making a sketch in a mirror with the sketch you're making also visible in the sketch. This cuts out the other 6 GB (or 30 GB or whatever the device has spare) of unused space that would otherwise be in the image.
The resulting image will also include the random noise beyond the greatest extent of the last partition.ĭon't forget to sudo the above commands if your account doesn't already have sufficient privileges.įor my purposes, I don't need an image that is perfectly trimmed down to the last bit of data so when the real size is 1.75 GB then a 2 GB image is near enough for me.
If you decide, for example, that your image should be exactly 2 GB, the following command will do that: dd if=/dev/mmcblk0 of=/path/to/pi_updated.img bs=1M count=2048 Total used space in GB = total used space in bytes / 1024 3 (here that's 1.749023 GB). Total used space in bytes = end sector of last partition X sector size (here that's 3667967 x 512). I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytesĭevice Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Substitute / with a space-separated list of all the mount points relating to the disk partitions.Ī more accurate way might be to use fdisk or your preferred partition editor and get busy with a calculator. If not, you can get a good idea from df: df -H -total / You may already know what size image you want to create. Using the bs and count parameters of dd, you can limit the size of the image, as seen in step 2 of answer 1665017. Sudo dd if=myimage/mbr.img of=/dev/sdX bs=446 count=1 Sudo cp -rf -preserve=all myimage/partition2/* /media/mount_point_partition2/ Sudo cp -rf -preserve=all myimage/partition1/* /media/mount_point_partition1/ On most computers, you just need to connect the disk and you can find the mounted partitions in /media folder.Ĭopy the previously copied data to destination partitions using following commands Mount the freshly formatted and partitioned disk. Partition the destination disk into partitions with sizes greater than copied data and should be of the same format and same flags using gparted. Replace /dev/sdX with the corresponding device. Sudo dd if=/dev/sdX of=myimage/mbr.img bs=446 count=1 Sudo cp -rf -preserve=all /media/mount_point_partition2/* myimage/partition2/ Sudo cp -rf -preserve=all /media/mount_point_partition1/* myimage/partition1/ Copy all the files from all the partitions preserving meta data