dd and Fat32

[Jamwa]

I have two questions;

1. Am trying to back up my hard drive to an external disk. The external disk is Fat32 formatted and the problem is that it can only take files which are maximum 4gb in size. The disk am trying to back up has 18gb data.

Whats the way around this?

This is the command am using

dd if=/dev/sda1 of=Hdd.iso

2. Suppose that Hdd.iso gets written successfully, how do I recreate the partition structures onto this (or any other) hard drive, since Hdd.iso will be one large file?

[madhavdiwan]

use the sfdisk utility in addition to your dd backlup and keep the result file beside your image on your external drive

to lean about it run the command :

man sfdisk

[beaker_]

1. It's been awhile for me but you can redirect dd's output to gzip (or other tar?) and let it compress and split the archive for you. A quick google search. However you can also use a util like partimage (yum install partimage) to image (compress & split) it for you. Not certain about all partitions through so do some homework.

2. dd is just a bit duplicator. If a partition table existed on /dev/sda1 then it'll be there, which it likely wont, so you're after the mbr. A quick goole search will kick that up (save and restore), the first 512 i.e.,