need help - sfdisk -d (backing up partition table) "permission denied"

[kennethmsmith]

I need help. I am trying to backup my partition table, including the extended partition table info. I used the following:

cd /root
mkdir partition-backup
cd partition-backup
dd if=/dev/hda of=backup-hda.mbr count=1 bs=512

using sudo ... that part worked !

then I tried to dump the extended partition info into a .sf file using :

sudo sfdisk -d /dev/hda > backup-hda.sf

BUT I GET "bash: backup-hda.sf: Permission denied"

Can someone explain why I can't dump this info into the file for backup purposes?

Thanks,
Ken

[Snowhog]

Re: need help - sfdisk -d (backing up partition table) "permission denied"

I just read through the manual (man sfdisk) and I don't see a -d option.

[kennethmsmith]

Re: need help - sfdisk -d (backing up partition table) "permission denied"

There are many options.
-d is just one of them:

-d
Dump the partitions of a device in a format useful as input to sfdisk. For example,

% sfdisk -d /dev/hda > hda.out
% sfdisk /dev/hda < hda.out

I'm just not sure why I get a permission denied response when I'm running it as Sudo, and the first part (backing up the mbr) worked.

[Snowhog]

Re: need help - sfdisk -d (backing up partition table) &quot;permission denied&quot;

My bad! :P Looked again, and there it is.

I tested this, both as 'regular user' in my home directory with:

sudo sfdisk -d /dev/sda > backup.sda.sf

and as root with:

sudo su
sfdisk -d /dev/sda > backup.sda.sf

Both worked in creating the file - the first in the users home directory and the second in the root directory.

[kennethmsmith]

Re: need help - sfdisk -d (backing up partition table) &quot;permission denied&quot;

Guess i wasn't switching using "su". Once I did that it seemed to work for me as well.

Now on to the task of backing up my partitions themselves....

Thanks for your help.

[Snowhog]

Re: need help - sfdisk -d (backing up partition table) &quot;permission denied&quot;

You're welcome.