I have a USB drive which has around 7MB of 'empty' space at its beginning. The first partition in MBR starts at 8225kB, according to Parted. How can I back up this space using something like dd? I've already backed up the MBR table using dd if=/dev/sdX bs=512 count=1 of=device.mbr. How can I give dd a byte range in the disk to grab and then write that locally to a file on disk?
Backup 'empty' parts of disk drive
hard disk;dd
Using the skip flag, bs flag, and count flag, you can control how much data dd reads in and when to start.dd if=/dev/sdX bs=1M count=7 skip=1 of=test.imgThat command would start off at the second Megabyte of the disk, and backup seven megabytes.