Here are some solutions to problems Linux users often
encounter. If you have a better solution or have a question please send your solutions,
questions, or comments to us.
Are any of these solutions obsolete? Are they clear and easy to understand?
Linux Geeks: copy a floppy with dd and gzip
From floppy to file on filesystem: dd if=/dev/fd0 | gzip --to-stdout -9 > image.file.gz
dd reads from floppy drive fd0 and writes to standard output. gzip compresses stdin to stdout. -9 tells gzip to compress better.
And the compressed image file is created.
From file on filesystem to floppy: cat image.file.gz | gzip -d --to-stdout | dd of=/dev/fd0
cat reads the compressed image file and pipes it to gzip. -d tells gzip to decompress. gzip'sstdout is piped to dd. dd writes to floppy fd0
If you have two floppy drives, and most people don't, you can just run: dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/dev/fd1
You can have more fun if you know how to use netcat. netcat lets you send data over your network. You get the drill.
I haven't tried to copy/clone a hard drive this way yet.
Anyone want to try this on a working hard drive? Let me know how it works out.
How about this:
Do the above with a USB hard drive plugged in to your computer. Then take the USB drive to an identical computer and decompress the image there.
The Linux kernel recognises the USB drive as /dev/sda. So on a single partition USB drive, you would use /dev/sda1.
