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

Mick <michaelkintzios@×××××.com> [16-03-29 19:12]:
> 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

Hi,

toppost/not toppost: As there were too many discussion about what
to do,not to do and why and why not I finally over the years decide 
to simply copy the way to answer.
Ian topposted ... I toppost.
Mick does not toppost ... I follow.

The real thing:
The usbstick has a partition table, which was the reason to ask
for a way to preserve it.

'pv' is faster than 'dd'.
How to copy the whole device is not my point. Compressing 64GB
of zeroes is easy and one will end up with a small thing...
comparable with a so called 'tar bomb'.
But: In the case of reconstructing the device it will take a (too) 
long to write 64GB of nearly nothing back to the drive.
Reading alone, which is faster than writing, took 1.5h.

Again my questions:
Where are the partioning/format defining on the device?
If there are only stored the beginning of the device: How
much do I need to copy?
If there are tools to extract all needed informations of the
partioning/formatting and to recreate exactly that kind of
partitioning/formatting later with that or other tools:
Which tools do I need and how to use them?

Thank you very much in advance for any help! :)

Best regards,
Meino