Making a Windows disk a file on Linux

Jerry Feldman gaf at blu.org
Fri Sep 10 07:53:01 EDT 2004


On Thu, 9 Sep 2004 23:12:46 -0400
Jeff Macdonald <macfisherman at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
> I just bought a new Dell Laptop for my wife and I'd like to use her
> old one for Linux. I have a file server running Gentoo that has mp3
> and videos and runs Samba for windows networking. What I'd like to do
> is dd the windows disk and have the target be a file and then mount
> that file as a FAT32 file system. In other words I don't want to
> create a partition for the data. I just want to keep it around for a
> while until I'm sure I don't need it anymore (a few years, just for
> good measure).
> 
> Here is the catch, the disk is 60Gigs but only 11Gigs is being used.
> So I'd rather have just a 11Gig file instead of a 60 Gig file (I only
> have 20 Gigs free anyway). Can I do something like:
> dd {opts} | gzip {options} > file
> mount {options to read compressed file}
> mount {loop options to present previous mount a FAT32}
> 
> or should I shrink the drive instead?
I don't think you can do it that way. FAT32 is a file system.
But, you could use tar or zip to save all the files as an archive, or
simply copy the Windows directory tree into a Linux directory. The main
difference here is that the Linux permission structure is used on native
Linux file systems where FAT32 has some attributes, such as hidden. 
Note that Win4Lin and WINE simulate Windows file systems as Linux
directory trees.

-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9
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