difference between mount point and physical drive?

[Albrecht Dreß]

Am 25.10.02 19:45:05 schrieb(en) Stephen Lewis:
> Sometimes it is faster than reading the
> filesystem, but because it copies empty
> blocks also it might be slower too. If your

It's sometimes nice to burn complete partitions compressed on a cd/dvd. To 
avoid that you have random data on the unused space, you can use e.g.

dd if=/dev/zero of=zerofile bs=1M count=1

(replace the "1M" with the free space on the disk), erase zerofile, unmount 
the partition, and say

dd if=/dev/sda1 | gzip -9 > pratition.gz

or even

dd if=/dev/sda | gzip -9 > pratition.gz

This is not fast, but nice if you want to make a "master copy" for 
installing several machines with identical disks. The second variant 
includes even the partition map, but may actually need a dvd...

Cheers,

	Albrecht.

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