3 Rules Of 'dd'

The three rules of 'dd':

1. Don't dd an active disk
2. Don't dd an active disk
3. Don't dd an active disk

When it came to making a final image of my Linux system disk, my Knoppix CD had already been shipped, and with time left before we left ticking away and so much to do, I decided to fly by the seat of my pants, and do the dd image of my server from the live system with all the partitions mounted as read/write. I mean, what could possibly go wrong with that?

Admittedly I'd planned to be also bringing the system drive with me, which I think made it easy to fly by the seat of my pants, a plan that was abandoned at about 3 in the morning as we ran out of room in our luggage.

Of course, the repercussions of such a decision are becoming obvious as I'm attempting to put the image back onto a disk - which appeared to work fine, although the computer would regularly lock up. Running a 'reiserfsck' on the root partition however indicated why - more errors than you can point a stick at!

From the outset, an older image of just that partition appears to be working better, luckily.