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Re: [Xen-users] Guest O/S Questions

Anthony Liguori wrote:

Marcus Brown wrote:

You're right.  fdisk (and AFAIK, modern partitioning tools) prefer to
start partitions on the first cylinder boundary. The assumption here is
that each cylinder contains 63 sectors.


OK, but why skip this cylinder?
If you are creating an image with multiple partitions won't you need to
keep the partition table intact?
Ok, let's back track a little. The dd command I suggested is only useful for extracting the first partition from a partitioned disk image assuming that the first partition occupies all of the remaining disk space and starts on the 63rd sector.

... *and* the goal is to end up with a filesystem image, *not* a partitioned file image.

Eg:  what's extracted is similar to what you'd get with:

  dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M seek=100 count=0 of=fs_image
  mke2fs -F fs_image
  mkdir mp
  mount -o loop -t ext2 fs_image mp

More traditional use of filesystem image files has been for files _without_ partition tables.

...or, to answer your question: if you're extracting individual filesystems to their own file, you _don't_ need to keep the partition table intact.

--
Karsten M. Self <karsten@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
XenSource, Inc.
2300 Geng Road #250                                +1 650.798.5900 x259
Palo Alto, CA 94303                                +1 650.493.1579 fax


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