iB::Topic::dd is locked out of hard drives on DSL

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Topic: dd is locked out of hard drives on DSL, dd: /dev/hdb: Invalid argument

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The Lightning Stalker Offline

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Posts: 10
Joined: Feb. 2004

Posted: Aug. 26 2006,04:50

Hello. I thought it would be a good idea to start a new topic since this is still occuring in the latest version. Here is the command and the error:

Code Sample

root@tty1[ramdisk]# dd if=/dev/hdb of=tivokernel3 count=8192 skip=64477335
dd: /dev/hdb: Invalid argument
root@tty1[ramdisk]#

Old topic: http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin....t=15021

Thanks,
The Lightning Stalker

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"And war broke out in heaven" - Re 12:7

The Lightning Stalker Offline

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Posted: Aug. 26 2006,05:19

Okay, I'm getting somewhere. Apparently either pdisk, which lists the partitions and their sizes and base addresses, is giving me the numbers in something other than blocks, which is what dd uses; or the dd that comes with DSL can't handle a HD this big. Does anyone happen to have the dd from a knoppix live CD? That one is purported to work.

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"And war broke out in heaven" - Re 12:7

The Lightning Stalker Offline

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Posted: Aug. 26 2006,19:28

Okay, well as usual, I'm answering my own question.

I've tried several other mini-distros and they all seem to suffer from this problem. The problem is in dd itself. It's a rather severe limitation to being able to work with only a few megabytes. Some versions will give the Invalid argument error, others will say 0+0 records in; 0+0 records out, and one I used actually made some HD activity but it was stuck in an infinite loop.

So we should probably be looking at knoppix's implementation of dd. Maybe another possible explanation could be that dd is wanting to use some library in order to get the longer data chunk support but that library isn't available so it just defaults to a limited data size. I didn't have much luck trying to find the knoppix source repository if it does exist. I'm kinda a newbie when it comes to that stuff anyway. ;)

Cheers,
The Lightning Stalker

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"And war broke out in heaven" - Re 12:7

humpty

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Posted: Sep. 13 2006,20:11

as i remember, you get a different version of dd if you load the gnu-utils.dsl.
you might try that.

Winter Knight Offline

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Joined: April 2006

Posted: Sep. 13 2006,20:55

I second humpty's recommendation. Try that first. gnu-utils.dsl is the core utils (including dd) from an old version of KNOPPIX (I think).

If it doesn't work, I have a few more....

Are you sure the drive is connected? I know it's obvious, but that doesn't mean it can't be it. As root (and after loading gnu-utils.dsl), try running, "cfdisk /dev/hdb". If you get FATAL ERROR: cannot open disk drive, then it probably isn't dd or cfidsk, but rather your connection. Try a different cable, etc.

You might want to consider compiling the latest version of coreutils. It would probably be somewhat of a hassle, and isn't that likely to be better than gnu-utils.dsl, but it's my other suggestion nonetheless.

Good luck.

5 replies since Aug. 26 2006,04:50

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