Andy said:
I think the answer to this would apply irregardless of what o.s. is on the pendrive, but I may be wrong or am wrong.
Is it possible to do a sector by sector copy of one pen drive to another of equal or greater capacity ?
It is FAT 32 and has Puppy Linux on it.
Most other Linux distros file systems are ext 3,4, and 5 if that makes any difference.
Appreciate your feedback.
Andy
I've done it, so the answer is yes.
Use another OS, use a port of "dd".
For example, to copy my Ubuntu 16GB stick to my
new 32GB stick, I did that in Windows (while Ubuntu
isn't running), then used the Windows port of
"dd" to do the copy.
http://www.chrysocome.net/dd
Note: dd version 0.5, does not detect the
end of a USB flash stick properly. If crafting
commands, specify both a block size (bs) and
count.
Example. I want to transfer 1,073,741,824 bytes of
data. I can specify that this way. This is actually
a one line command, but I did it this way to make
it easier to read.
dd if=<source file or partition>
of=<destination file or partition>
bs=1048576
count=1024
With that port of "dd", you open command prompt
and try out
dd --list
and it will tell you the names of the devices
and partitions. That's how you figure out how
to craft a partition (block oriented) reference.
*******
Linux does not mind, if you place multiple partitions
on a USB stick. You can use an MBR, use a copy of
Linux fdisk, and put four primary partitions on there.
When Windows sees that, it honors the first partition,
and ignores the other three.
I think it's also possible to put a file system on
a USB stick, without an MBR. So there are actually
some differences, when compared to a hard drive.
They don't work identically in all respects.
*******
Since you're copying sector by sector, it
really doesn't matter what file system is inside
the partition. It could be a FreeBSD file system
even.
Paul
