Creating an image of the NTFS partition

[TLis]

Hi,

I have a 4,5GB NTFS partition (/dev/hda1), and a FAT32 partition (/mnt/hda7), where there is about 7GB of free space left.

I have changed the RW mode of the /mnt/hda7 partition, and issued a command (found in some Linux tutorial on the net):

dd if=/dev/hda1 | gzip -v6 | dd of=/mnt/hda7/cImage.gz

After a while I have got an "out of disk space" message, and I have seen, that the file cImage.gz has been created, containing EXACTLY 2GB image file. I suspect, that this is NOT a problem with the free disk space on /mnt/hda7, but rather I have encountered some size limitation - which one? Of the filesystem or of one of the utilities.

Knoppix 3.4. has been used.

Thanks in advance for your comments.

[OErjan]

yes there is a 2Gb sizelimt to some versions of fat32.
M$ has curtailed their own filesystem for some reason (it SHOULD be 4G -1b or in other words 2^32b).
use some linux filesystem for it that should work. ext2, ext3 or reiserfs would work, my preference would be ext3 folowed by reiserfs.

[TLis]

That's what I have suspected

Unfortunately, I have rather small HDD on my laptop, an my main OS is Windows XP, since the software, that I am using, does not work on Linux.

Therefore, I would rather use a filesystem, that Windows can recognise, since I cannot dedicate some GB for ext3 filesystem just for storing my backups. Since FAT32 has obviously some limitations, do you think, that NTFS would be OK? (probably I would have to use captive NTFS driver - have not tested this yet .

Alternatively, maybe there is a way to split the image file into fragments smaller than 2GB before compressing with gzip??? Since I am not so well acquainted with Linux commands, if you know, how to modify my pipe sequence given in the original post to include splitting the image into fragments, please let me know. In such case, please suggest also the proper command for restoring the image from such a splitted image.