[fedora] dd

[Chris Tyler]

On Sat, 2011-09-03 at 20:36 +0800, xinyou yan wrote:
> I want to make sure one thing .
> Can I use tar to pack the file created by dd.
> I found use           tar -rf xx.tar yyy.dd
> can't make the file into the tar file .

It depends on what is in the dd file and what you're trying to do.

I assume that the dd file is a direct copy of a filesystem (for example,
"dd if=/dev/sda2 of=yyy.dd" assuming that /dev/sda2 is a filesystem
partition).

If you simply want to reduce the size of the dd file, use gzip: 
  gzip yyy.dd # produces yyy.dd.gz

If you want to create a tar archive of the individual files within the
dd image, you will have to mount the dd file first using the loopback
option:
  mkdir /tmp/yyy
  mount -o loop yyy.dd /tmp/yyy
  cd /tmp
  tar cvf xx.tar yyy


-Chris