Linux

Give DD a progress bar

This is a short description on how you can get a progress bar to your dd command or other commands as well using the command pv. pv is a shell pipeline element to meter data passing through and can be installed using aptitude in Ubuntu. # aptitude install pv As an example I create a […]

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Scripting

How to corrupt a disk partition using dd

I wanted to test corruption of a 41TB XFS filesystem and the dd command was the perfect tool for the job. I used a block size of 512 bytes and wrote 10 blocks of data from device /dev/urandom to the partition /dev/sdb1. The “Seek” option specifies how many blocks are skipped, counting 100 blocks from […]

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Linux

Create a empty file using dd

How to create a empty/null file with a specified size # dd if=/dev/zero of=destinationfile.bin bs=1024k count=100 This command creates a 100MB (1024k * 100) sized file.

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Linux

Backup partition table

This post describes how you can backup your partition table for future recovery. Backup This example describes how you can backup the disk partition table on /dev/sda dd if=/dev/sda of=sda.mbr bs=512 count=1 It’s also useful to keep a human readable copy of the disk layout for future reference sudo fdisk -l > partitions.lst Restore This […]

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Misc

Mount a RAID Reconstructor disk image in linux

This post came to life because I had gotten a image file of a 120GB linux ext2 RAID partition that I couldn’t access using Windows software. The partition had been rescued by RAID Reconstructor, a Windows software that can rebuild RAID arrays by combining the disks from the RAID and store it as one image […]

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