partition

In an Ubuntu 18.04 two disk setup (/ on SSD, /home on spinning drive), my Ubuntu 18.04 has still defaulted to use swap space on the SSD although there was a swap partition of the same size on the spinning drive. This was not a new install, but a system upgrade from 16.04 (where I had created a swap partition manually on the spinning drive to spare the SSD). Linux is able to determine whether a drive is spinning or not, but apparently the installation/upgrade script was not very smart.

You can make disk dumps from individual partitions or from a hard drive that contains more than one partition. The ladder has the advantage that you can restore the computer by dumping back the image onto the same or another hard drive. But if you want to access an individual partition from a hard drive image, you need to know where the partition boundaries are. You can note them down from the output of fdisk. However, fdisk -l gives the partition boundaries, but the unit is sectors. You need to multiply this number by the logical sector size to get the partition boundaries in bytes.

The Linux installation is as follows:

/dev/hdb1 100 MB /boot
/dev/hdb2 8 MB /home
/dev/hdb3 8 MB /
/dev/hdb4 Extended partition
/dev/hdb5 1 GB Linux swap
/dev/hdb6 100 GB NTFS