Making *.img to backup a Windows partition
Hello everyone,
Parcival reporting back into the wonderful world of Linux; my 1337 skills are sort of rusted in, however, so please bear with me. :)
So, here is my question:
What exactly allows me to create a custom tailored *.img file to backup the contents of a partition?
This is my problem:
My wife wants me to backup some Windows NTFS partitions on her working computer so she can use them on a different computer.
This is my solution attempt:
- Boot the Gentoo based System Rescue CD.
- dd the contents of the data partitions into *.img files on an external usb drive.
- dd the contents of the *.img files onto the new computer.
So far that worked, but there's one annoying problem: one partition on the work computer is 50GB big, but contains only 8GB of data. It would be really nice if I could just dd out those 8GB of "real data" instead of having a 50GB *.img file that is mostly empty. Likewise, it would be cool if there's an easy way to match the contents of the *.img file to the size of the new partition. The new data partition is 100GB big so it would be cool if my backup were automatically scaled to that size so I don't have an 8GB partition and an additional 92GB partition.
Thanks in advance,
Parcival