Thread: Which Linux distributions do you use?
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Unread 06-04-2013, 15:07
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Re: Which Linux distributions do you use?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ether View Post
dd if=/dev/sda of=/mnt/sdb1/MBR.img bs=512 count=1
Just to be 100% clear:

For the reasons explained by rbmj above, this command is perfectly safe.

The output file, /mnt/sdb1/MBR.img is a normal file -- it is not a device node, and does not control anything inside the kernel. Therefore, writing to it is a safe operation.

The underlying filesystem is sufficiently abstracted away such that dd is never aware it is writing to an NTFS partition -- it simply tells the kernel "put this data into this file", and the kernel deals with the filesystem itself.