I used gzip to compress an image which is quite huge still. dd if=/dev/sda bs=1M | gzip -c -9 > sda.dd.img.gz And when trying to decompress and write it to the former partition gunzip sda.dd.img.gz >/dev/sdh (using ">" instead of dd, as described here, its content is first written to another file (instead of directly to the partition as I expected).
The Problem: the Partition where the zipped file is on is to. small. I could use a external media but that will take more time. But would prefer to write the decompressed data to the partition directly .. ?? So I decided to get more info about zipping itself first.. but it left me even more confused (see my first response here) Can anyone give any hint, please ?

thanks in advance,