Posted on by drakken

A little fun with dd

dd can be use in a lot of creative ways, but before playing with it remember to:

  • always triple check if= and of= values
  • never ever write on a mounted filesystem

Here some examples of fun things you can do with dd:

Backup an entire partition

# dd if=/dev/sda1 of=~/disk.img

For a compressed version:

# dd if=/dev/sda1 | gzip > ~/disk.img.gz

On a remote machine:

# dd if=/dev/sda1 | ssh foobar@192.168.0.2 "sudo dd of=/home/foobar/disk.img"

Restore an image partition

# dd if=disk.img of=/dev/sda1

For a compressed version:

# dd if=disk.img.gz | gunzip | dd of=/dev/sda1

Rip a CDROM

# dd if=/dev/cdrom of=disk.iso bs=2048

Clone hard disks

# dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=4096 iflag=noerror oflag=sync

Erase MBR content

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1

Further Reading and sources