you seem to be subscribing to the 'its easier to do it all in one line' approach. don't do that. 1) dump: dd if=<device> of=imagefile.iso 2) compress: bzip2 -z imagfile.iso -c > imagfile.iso.bz2 3) send: scp your_username at remotehost.edu:imagefile.iso /some/local/directory/imagefile.iso.bz2 4) decompress : bunzip imagefile.iso.bz2 ok, enough wrinkles here that you need to iron out by reading the man pages, I'll -- Nehemiah I. Dacres Saint Louis University: Advanced Technology Group Linux System Administrator -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-virt/attachments/20110804/12d0ea8d/attachment-0006.html>