When you image a drive with dd, you get a image usually of the same exact size of the drive. You can compress the image, but that is really Dependant on how many continuous null's or zeros their are on the drive. My question is, does another tool exist to only image the critical blocks of the drive. Such as with a fresh install of an OS, is it possible to only copy up to the last block utilized by the new os?
while I know dd doesn't have such abilities, does such already exist, and if it does then does that app use dd.
Best Answer
For quick and dirty sort-of imaging of a Windows box, I boot a SystemRescueCD, and execute the following script (located on an external USB backup drive mounted on /mnt/backup):
Oh, the external drive is usually formatted NTFS, mounted with "-t ntfs-3g".