Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (2008 mails)

[Stan Goodman <stan.goodman@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 15:31:29 on Saturday Saturday 25 April 2009, "Carlos E. R." 
<robin.listas@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Friday, 2009-04-24 at 22:04 +0300, Stan Goodman wrote:
>
> ...
>
> > > Potential problem is that dd doesn't check much ahead of transfer,
> > > if sdb3 is just a sector shorter then sda3, the result can be error
> > > message, or overwritten begin of the next partition. I can't tell
> > > which will be the case, although I would expect error message, and
> > > partition most probably in tact, ie. usable. The same is problem in
> > > case of any typo, it will diligently overwrite target without
> > > questions.
> >
> > The v11.1/home partition is set to be larger than the v10.3/home.
>
> Notice that if you dd a partition to another, and say, source is 1 GiB,
> and destination is, say, 2 GiB, the end result is a filesystem that
> "thinks" it has only 1 GiB and wastes the other 1 GiB.

In other words, it ignores the file system that was there before the 
copying began, and formats according to whatever is on the source 
partition? And stops when the copying is complete, leaving the rest 
unformatted? Very bad, as I am thinking of enlarging the /home partition.

> If the situation is the reverse, dd will stop at 1 GiB (1), but the
> resulting filesystem will be broken, because it thinks it has 2 GiB.

=;-/8

> As you are copying files, you should be better using a file copy tool,
> like rsync. Or even midnight commander.
> Or you could use clonezilla.

Why is any one of these better than the simple cp, which knows very well 
how to copy files?

Thanks...

-- 
Stan Goodman
Qiryat Tiv'on
Israel
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