On 1/13/07, Reinhard Gimbel <opensuse@dragonfly7.de> wrote:
Hello Bo, hello community !
Bo wrote / schrieb:
I've just been lurking so far but I would be happy to recieve some help on the topic of how to clone an entire disk (with partitions and diferent filesystems and all) on a dual boot home systen. No servers or anything.
Unix command "dd" (= device dump) is your friend !
Assuming the disk to clone is connected to primary IDE channel as master (=/dev/hda) and the target disk resides on primary IDE as slave (=/dev/hdb) the command you need to issue looks like this:
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=128M
The option "bs" specifies a buffer of 128MB size. Otherwise "dd" would copy blocks of 512 byte each ...
I agree with others, that a Ghost like program would be better than dd, but if you're going to use dd to copy a whole disk, use the read error options to continue past the occasional bad sector: dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=128M conv=noerror,sync And bs=4k is big enough in my experience. (And I do this a lot including timing tests etc..) If you're target is a tape, then you want (need) a big blocksize like above, but be sure to label your disk with the blocksize you used. I've found that a lot of tapes can only be read if you use the same blocksize as you wrote. Greg -- Greg Freemyer The Norcross Group Forensics for the 21st Century -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org