[rbmj]

Originally Posted by Ether

Pardon the brief thread hijack, but I guess there are probably some Linux gurus here. Quick question if I may?

can dd write an output file to a ntfs file system?

for example, I want to save an image of the MBR on sda to a file in a folder in sdb1, where the file system in the sdb1 partition is ntfs:

dd if=/dev/sda of=/mnt/sdb1/MBR.img bs=512 count=1

Will this work, and not corrupt the filesystem in the sdb1 partition?

dd only sees files. As long as you can write to the location, it won't corrupt anything. It's only dangerous when your output file happens to be directly mapped to disk.