On Fri, 31 Aug 2007, Timothy Murphy wrote:
Jacques B. wrote:
> On 8/30/07, Timothy Murphy <tim(a)birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie> wrote:
>> Jacques B. wrote:
>>
>> > Your first part is correct. You can dd a smaller partition onto an
>> > equal or larger one.
>>
>> Are you sure you can dd onto (or rather into) a larger partition?
>> I tried that some years ago, and it led to confusion, IIRC.
>
> Yes you can. You end up with slack space at the end of the partition.
> In other words if you dd a 10 gig drive onto a 30 gig drive, you will
> have what appears to be a 10 gig drive. The remaining 20 gigs will be
> unused.
I understand the theory.
But in my (very limited) experience, the conflicting information
on the system may cause confusion.
What for example does fdisk say?
The MBR presumably will think you have a 30 gig drive.
undoubtedly, it will. beyond the (up to) 446 bytes of actual code in
the MBR, there's room for a 64-byte partition table, with 4 16-byte
entries. what those partitions contain is of no interest to the
actual partition table, so if you create a "short" filesystem in a
partition, the MBR will have no idea about that.
rday
p.s. what the last two bytes of the MBR contain is left as an
exercise for the reader. :-)
--
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Robert P. J. Day
Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry
Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA
http://crashcourse.ca
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