On Wed, Aug 24, 2005 at 10:47:06AM -0700, Gary W. Swearingen wrote: > David Kelly <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > The advantage of dump/restore is that only the necessary data is > > written. With dd all the unused blocks on the media are also written, > > including the filesystem, which will probably work on the larger card. > > If you don't mind educating me further for no particular need... > > I've long known about the UNIX concept of everything being a string of > bytes, but came to the conclusion early in my Linux days that disks > couldn't be used as a filesystem after a "dd" unless their cylinders > were the same size (or maybe it was just tracks). Has this all gone > away with FreeBSD's removal of "block devices" and/or with LBA disks?
When I last did any significant amount of FreeBSD-on-CF, FreeBSD was at 4.6 and I think the CF card hooked in on the SCSI drivers. In any case, back then I had no problems block copying a 32MB CF onto a 256MB CF, boot blocks, partition table, and everything so long as one didn't mind losing everything over 32MB. What I did have problems with is a few 256MB CF's in a lot which were externally identical to the others but a handful of blocks shorter. Thats when I nuked the dd procedure I had inherited and replaced with a script which started with newfs. Newfs was smart enough to detect the size and do the right thing. Yes, tar and/or pax are not able to copy/restore the special BSD flags which dump/restore does. I think I used mtree to beat my final CF image into the desired shape, permissions, owner/group, and BSD flags. -- David Kelly N4HHE, [EMAIL PROTECTED] ======================================================================== Whom computers would destroy, they must first drive mad. _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"