[buug] dd to clone

[Tony Godshall]

It usually works for me, as long as I don't go over those odd
historical boundarys (like head/track/cyl-to-LBA or or 2GB or 8GB or
old-LBA-to-48-bit).  Forgive me if I'm fuzzy on the specifics- the
trick seems to be that the partition tables are compatible.

I often save off images for future use too, like this...

  # make sure empty space is compressible
  mount /dev/hdx1 /mnt
  dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/tmpzero; rm -f /mnt/tmpzero
  umount /mnt
  #(repeat for other partitions)
  cat /dev/hdx | gzip > /bigexternaldrive/hdx.img.gz

On 3/8/07, Bruce Ferrell <bferrell at baywinds.org> wrote:
> I'm not too sure about putting the MBR from one disk onto a dissimilar
> disk.  As I recall there may be stuff specific to the disk geometry...
> been a long time and I could be wrong there
>
> John de la Garza wrote:
> > This kind of gets back to me wanting to use dd.  From what I see this
> > is a gui to dd (and some other things like netcat).  I'm kind of in
> > need of a command line tool.  I only have a shell interface to work  with.
> >
> > Although, if I play with this I may get some ideas from looking at  what
> > it does to image a drive.
> >
> >
> > On Mar 8, 2007, at 2:17 PM, Bruce Ferrell wrote:
> >
> >> true, no mbr.  got something different:
> >>
> >> http://air-imager.sourceforge.net/
> >>
> >> Just saw it today
> >>
> >> John de la Garza wrote:
> >>
> >>> This wont copy the MBR or the partition table.  I am looking for  a
> >>> way to clone a harddrive, not just a directory.
> >>> On Mar 7, 2007, at 3:09 PM, Bruce Ferrell wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> use tar.  it'll give you an accurate copy independant of the
> >>>> underlying hardware.  something like this:
> >>>>
> >>>> tar cvf - <hda root> | (cd <hdb root> ; tar xvf -)
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>> John de la Garza wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>>> I have a linux box that is up and running in a production
> >>>>> environment.
> >>>>> I want to reproduce the box for a backup server.  If I want to  use dd
> >>>>> to copy the harddrive could I simply do something like:
> >>>>> dd if=/dev/hda bs=1024k  of=/dev/hdb
> >>>>> or must I know more about the hard drives and do some
> >>>>> calculations  for
> >>>>> how much data to copy?
> >>>>> hdb is greater than or equal to the size of hda in this case
> >>>>> _______________________________________________
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> >
> >
> >
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-- 
--
Tony Godshall
g