Re: [gentoo-user] Preserving the initial partionin/formatting of an usbstick

[Mick]

On Tuesday 29 Mar 2016 18:33:01 Meino.Cramer@×××.de wrote:
> Hi Ian,
>
> If I do a
>
>     eix partclone
>
> I get
>
>     No matches found.
>     [1]    7241 exit 1     eix -n partclone
>
> . May be a typo... ;)

Please try not to top-post, it confuses the flow of the thread.

Ian's suggestions for using dd are good and I would like to add:

-Add a block size (e.g. bs=4096) or you'll be waiting for some time for the 
command to finish.

-Pipe the output through gzip or bzip2 to compress what will be mostly empty 
bits and bytes.


However, to start with check (using e.g. fdisk -l) if the USB stick has a 
partition table on it in the first place.  Many USB sticks have no partition 
table and the vfat fs is created across the whole device (as if it were one 
large partition).  Nothing wrong with this as long as you don't try to boot 
from it.  The BIOS will try to jump to an MBR and the first partition and may 
complain when it does not find one there.

You can use 'minfo' from the mtools package to find out what the geometry of 
the USB stick is, before you reformat it.

BTW, some USB sticks of unknown provence come with malware in them.  So 
reformatting them before use is a good security measure.
-- 
Regards,
Mick