bs = buffer size (basically defined the size of a "unit" used by count and skip) count = the number of buffers to copy (16m * 32 = 1/2 gig) skip = (32 * 2) we are grabbing piece 3...which means 2 have already been written so skip (2 * count) i will edit this later if i can to make this all more understandable
An alternative which does not require to be root
I'm both a one-liner fan and a haskell learner
Only slightly different than previous commands. The benefit is that your "watch" should die when the dd command has completed. (Of course this would depend on /proc being available)
Sends the "USR1" signal every 1 second (-n 1) to a process called exactly "dd". The signal in some systems can be INFO or SIGINFO ... look at the signals list in: man kill
Pressing ctrl-t will display the progress Show Sample Output
This will create a 10 MB file named testfile.txt. Change the count parameter to change the size of the file. As one commenter pointed out, yes /dev/random can be used, but the content doesn't matter if you just need a file of a specific size for testing purposes, which is why I used /dev/zero. The file size is what matters, not the content. It's 10 MB either way. "Random" just referred to "any file - content not specific" Show Sample Output
Put into some file. No special purpouse, just for fun...
dcfldd is a forensic version of dd that shows a process indicator by default.
Step#2 Create a copy of the bootload and partition table!
The previously-posted one-liner didn't work for me for whatever reason, so I ended up doing this instead.
Keep width to a power of 2 to see patterns emerge. 512 is good. So is 4096 for huge maps. PNM headers are super basic. http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/pbm.html Show Sample Output
run this in another terminal, were xxxx is the process ID of the running dd process. the progress will report on the original terminal that you ran dd on
While a dd is running in one terminal, open another and enter the while loop. The sample output will be displayed in the window running the dd and the while loop will exit when the dd is complete. It's possible that a "sudo" will need to be inserted before "pkill", depending on your setup, for example:
while pgrep ^dd; do sudo pkill -INFO dd; sleep 10; done
Show Sample Output
If you don't want your computer to try to boot form a USB stick that used to be used as a boot device (maybe for a live linux distro), you will have to remove the boot loader from your stick other wise the boot will fail each time the device is attached to your PC.
Create a bunch of random files with random binary content. Basically dd dumps randomly from your hard disk to files random-file*. Show Sample Output
Quick grab of the data to the new disk!
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