Tony Nugent wrote:
> Yes, of course. But you need to be careful doing it, as the *inode*
> structure (or FAT table or whatever) of the filesystem is also exactly
> copied. The partitions need to be *exactly* the same size, or the
> underlying filesystem format will be corrupted.
[stuff deleted]
> If, for example, a 500Mb partition image was dd'ed onto a bigger
> partition, say 600Mb, then you'll have filesystem conflicts
> (irrespective of what sort of partition it is) that are likely to
> result as a consequence of only 500Mb of the 600Mb partition being
> properly formatted. You'll either "loose" 100Mb, or the
> inconsistencies will cause things to crash sooner or later.
A data structure that doesn't know how long it is and depends on
the containing device to keep track of its length strikes me as
pretty unlikely. The DOS filesystem certainly does not operate this
way: DOS determines the size of a filesystem by reading the DOS
Boot Sector (the first sector of the DOS partition) not the partition
table. Too, because the size of the file allocation table is fixed at
time of format additional clusters cannot be allocated later no
matter what the partition table says.
Given all this, I'm not sure I understand why the receiving partition
must be *exactly* the same length as the filesystem being copied
into it. It seems to me so long as people make sure that the
receiving partition is a little larger than the filesystem they are
copying into it they should be all right.
Ed
