Question: I want to create image from hard disk without free space (useless space) in linux(ex3 type).

I've been tried to create image with **dd** command but this command gave us total size of hard disk.

I need data on this hard disk without free space.

thanks a lot.

Answer: 
One option would be to create the file system image as a [**sparse file**](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparse_file). You could first run an utility such as [zerofree](https://frippery.org/uml/) on your ext3 file system to make sure all free blocks are filled with zeros, and then just image the disk with `dd` and pipe the image through `cp` with the `--sparse=always` option to force it to create a sparse file:

```
dd if=/dev/whatever | cp --sparse=always /dev/stdin disk.image

```
If you're using LVM, clonezilla is the way to go.