This is a report for busybox in RHEL 5.7 installer. As I think the issue is more related to busybox than RHELs installer, I'm reporting it here. Sorry I don't have access to newer version of busybox, to check does the issue exist in newer versions. When I supply to big number dd(1) command fails with error 'invalid number' however it doesn't happen to dd(1) version from coreutils. -sh-3.2# grep -e 'sda$' /proc/partitions 8 0 35566479 sda -sh-3.2# dd --help BusyBox v1.2.0 (2011.07.22-08:19+0000) multi-call binary -sh-3.2# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda seek=36411452416 count=8622592 bs=1 dd: invalid number `36411452416' I did some testing here, but not sure at what number exactly it fails: -sh-3.2# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda seek=5000000000 count=0 bs=1 dd: invalid number `5000000000' -sh-3.2# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda seek=4000000000 count=0 bs=1 0+0 records in 0+0 records out -sh-3.2#
busybox-1.2.x internally use strtoul() to parse numbers fin dd options. Therefore they can't accept numbers larger than 2^32-1. 1.2.x is VERY old. Newer versions don't have this limitation. Looks like WONTFIX to me...