dd and file compression experience

[scott-DPNOqEs/LNQ at public.gmane.org (Scott Ehrlich)]

I just wanted to provide results of a recent experiment.

I had a new system configured as 50/50 dual-boot (XP Pro and CentOS 5).

A ghost image of XP Pro with high compression resulted in three 2 Gig 
files plus a little left over.

Ghost can't handle the CentOS stuff at all, so I opted for a dd of the 
drive.  I used a Knoppix 5.1.1 CD, mounted a Windows box with a shared 
folder, and ran dd if=/dev/sda|gzip > /mnt/shared_folder

When done, the file size was just 18 GB!   I was very happy.  I do believe 
a successful aid was, as was mentioned here before, cleaning out /tmp then 
running dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/foo then deleting /tmp/foo.

Thanks to all.

Now fighting split to break the file into 4 GB chunks to place onto DVD!

Scott

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