On Wednesday 22 January 2003 10:50 am, Phil Driscoll wrote:
Both Gary and Mark have mentioned that the raw copy of a disk is best only used when the disks have identical geometry. I don't know the first thing about how the kernel drivers actually access the drives, but surely on a modern machine it's no longer by cylinder head sector any more? Isn't LBA the norm these days - and if that's the case, surely - for once :) - size matters, and not geometry.
If you look at /proc/ide/hda/geometry, it will show you both the physical and logical geometry of a HD. The physical one can realistically be ignored but the logical one is the one used by the partition managements s/w such as fdisk - compare against fdisk -l /dev/hda. (BTW, for EVERY linux box you have, run 'fdisk -l /dev/hda|lpr' and keep it safe for when you splat you partition tables). This geometry controls the start/end points of partitions, e.g. starting at beginning of cylinder etc. Therefore, you can clone a disk with c/h/s of 1025/255/63 to a disk of 2096/255/63 without any problems, but a waste of 2096-1025 cylinders, while cloning to (theoretical) 1025/63/255 won't work. -- Gary Stainburn This email does not contain private or confidential material as it may be snooped on by interested government parties for unknown and undisclosed purposes - Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, 2000