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On Tuesday 29 Mar 2016 19:53:45 Meino.Cramer@×××.de wrote: |
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> The real thing: |
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> The usbstick has a partition table, which was the reason to ask |
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> for a way to preserve it. |
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OK, I wasn't sure if it did. |
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In this case as I suggested, fdisk will show you the number and size of |
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partitions. minfo will show you the geometry of the partition, should you |
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wish to manually recreate it in the future. However, there are tools to help |
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avoid manual partitioning! ;-) |
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To answer exactly what you asked, copy the partition table (assuming all the |
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USB stick contains is a single primary partition) by using good ol' dd: |
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dd if=/dev/sdX of=~/mbr.img bs=512 count=1 |
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Reverse the command to paste the MBR and partition table back. That should |
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bring you back where you started when you first bought the USB stick. If for |
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some weird reason the USB stick partitioning scheme included extended and |
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logical partitions, then read one additional step below. |
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> Again my questions: |
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> Where are the partioning/format defining on the device? |
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> If there are only stored the beginning of the device: How |
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> much do I need to copy? |
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> If there are tools to extract all needed informations of the |
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> partioning/formatting and to recreate exactly that kind of |
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> partitioning/formatting later with that or other tools: |
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> Which tools do I need and how to use them? |
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First copy the MBR and partition table using dd as I suggested above. Then |
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use sfdisk --dump to create a text file with information on the size and |
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positioning of the remaining partitions. |
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sfdisk --dump /dev/sdX > sdX.dump |
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To restore first run dd in the reverse order: |
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dd if=~/mbr.img of=/dev/sdX bs=512 count=1 |
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Then change the file director on the sfdisk --dump command: |
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sfdisk --dump /dev/sdX < sdX.dump |
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Needless to say you will need both 'mbr.img' and 'sdX.dump' files to restore |
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the drive partitioning scheme to its original state, if it contains more than |
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one primary partition. When you are restoring the partition tables, double |
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check the /dev/sdX name or you could damage some other disk in your system! |
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-- |
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Regards, |
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Mick |
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