Introduction
In this article, we will discuss how to find the partition starting offset when cloning a partition using the dd.exe tool in Windows with MSYS2. The process requires three pieces of information: the physical drive name, the partition starting offset (in MiB), and the partition size (in MiB).
Prerequisites
Before we begin, make sure you have the following:
- MSYS2 installed on your Windows system
- A source partition to clone
- Destination disk or partition to store the cloned data
Finding Partition Starting Offset
To find the partition starting offset, you can use various tools like Disk Management, PowerShell, or third-party software. Here, we will use the wmic command in MSYS2.
Using wmic
Open the MSYS2 terminal and run the following command:
wmic diskget size, mediaType, signature, volumename | grep "C:" -A 1 | grep -E "Size|StartingOffset" | awk '{print $NF, $3}'Replace "C:" with the drive letter of your source partition. This command will display the size and starting offset of the partition.
Cloning Partition with dd.exe
Once you have the partition starting offset and size, you can clone the partition using the dd.exe tool. Open the MSYS2 terminal and run the following command:
dd if=/dev/sdX bs=4M of=/path/to/destination/image.img count=+$(awk '{print int(($5+$4)/1024/1024)}' RS=":" < /dev/cdksh /sys/block/sdX/size | awk '{print $1}' | awk '{print int($1/1024/1024)}') start=$(awk '{print int($1/1024/1024)}' < /dev/cdksh /sys/block/sdX/size | awk '{print $1}') seek=$(awk '{print int($1/1024/1024)*512+$2}' < /dev/cdksh /sys/block/sdX/size | awk '{print $1}') if=/dev/sdX of=/path/to/destination/image.img conv=noerror,sync status=progress bs=4M seek=$seek count=$(( $(awk '{print int(($5+$4)/1024/1024)}' RS=":" < /dev/cdksh /sys/block/sdX/size | awk '{print $1}' | awk '{print int($1/1024/1024)}' ) * 512))Replace "/dev/sdX" with the source partition's device path and "/path/to/destination/image.img" with the path to the destination image file. This command will clone the partition starting at the given offset and of the given size.
In this article, we learned how to find the partition starting offset and clone a partition using the dd.exe tool in Windows with MSYS2. We used the wmic command to find the partition size and starting offset, and then used the dd.exe command to clone the partition.