Should destination partition be
unmounted when using Pudd; doesn't work if it is so?
From a flash drive on laptop I am booting Lucid-525. I wanted
to backup a bootable Linux live distro on a 2GB flash drive (,
/dev/sdd1[vfat]) to the laptop's host drive-partition
/dev/sda1.
This would be my first time using Pudd so I was unaware that the
destination partition, sda1. should not have been mounted. It
was mounted and was not shown on the list. Clicking on
probedisk unmounted the partition and all went well up to when I had
to navigate to the destination directory. I could go no deeper
than /mnt/sda1. I accepted that and entered the name pqi_SRCD
for the image file. The messagebox stated that it was saving
pqi_SRCD.img.gz to /mnt/sda1 but the HD activity light on the host
drive never blinked and at the end the image file was never saved
though the program said it was successfully done. Searches for
pqi_* and *.img came up empty.
On a second attempt, this time with sda1 unmounted, when I navigated
to the destination /dev/sda1, pqi_srcd.img.gz showed in the Files
pane but it is not in the directory (it isn't hidden). I
aborted.
I rebooted to remove any detrius and tried a third time.

The listed partitions are unmounted. Note /dev/sda1 was
mounted so it is not shown here. And the boot flash sdc1 which
is mounted throughout a session is not shown either. But is "A
mounted partition should be unmounted before copying from/to it"
correct? I choose partition sdd1 then at the next screen
selected Choose_file for the destination.
When I navigated to sda1, the Files panel was empty; the name used
earlier was gone. Once again I could go no deeper than the
sda1 root. (Afterall, I can't possibly access an unmounted
partition, can I?)

My selection is /mnt/sda1.
Here is the screenshot of the last messagebox.

Destination is /mnt/sda1/pqi_srcd2.img.gz; /dev/sda1 is not included
in the listed mounted partitions. Earlier I was told that
neither the source or destination partitions are to be mounted, now
I am cautioned to make sure the mounted
partition has sufficient space for the source. Well, I threw caution
to the wind and mounted sda1 while the message was still on
screen. Voila, the compressed archive was saved to sda1.
Now I am really confused because it seemed to work with an unmounted source device and a mounted destination.
Can somebody try this and confirm the behaviour? Which
instruction needs to be changed and what should it state?
In the Choose_file screen, it states that if file is selected then
it will be compressed. IMHO, there is no need to repeat it in
a subsequent screen. Rather, it should only ask if the user
wants to zero the unused areas of the image.
B. K. Johnson