UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I want to clone a 3.5GB partition from a pen drive (that contains a remastered version of XUbuntu), onto a number of other computers whose hard drives are much larger. The procedure I have tried so far is to:

1) use Gparted Live CD to create a large partition on the target machine and a much smaller swap partition.

2) reboot and then using the same Live CD, insert the master pen drive and then use the dd command as such:

"dd if=/dev/sdc1 of=/dev/sda1 bs=32256"

However, this results in a long copy time and "df -h" shows that the target partition is almost full - even though it is significantly larger than the source partition which was copied to it.

The only way I can see of doing this task is to make the target partition the same size and then use gParted afterwards to expand that partition.

Any other ideas greatly appreciated.

You certainly can copy an image of a partiton from a small partition to a larger partition or filesystem using dd. Your problem is that you forgot to add a "count=" option.

BTW, if you want to ensure your copy is exact you can use dcfldd which will calculate and check MD5 hashes as it is doing the copy. dcfldd is a forensics image copy tool which is freely available.