On Tue, Feb 28, 2017 at 3:00 PM, Stevens <fred-n-sandy@myrhinomail.com> wrote:
I ask this kinda stupid question only because I really don't want to experiment with my only running computer.
A friend has a bunch of very old Windows crap and wanted to know if I could "clone" a couple of his drives so he gave me 2 good drives and several "target" drives - all laptop ide, I think - anyway, I have one usb adapter that I can use, so the question is will the following work to clone a drive? dd if= /dev/sdb (the usb drive) of=/user/[my user home]/temp/bck
If so, what would I need to tell it to make a bootable clone? Just reverse the commands? The drive is 540MB so space isn't an issue...
And yes, disk partitioning software does see the usb drive and when it is plugged in the system allows me to open it in Dolphin.
Thanks, Fred
Yes, that will work as long as you run it as root, but if it's that old, you might have a bad sector or two. At a minimum use this: dd if=/dev/sdb of=[whatever] bs=512 conv=noerror,sync bs=512 will slow things down, but make sure that if you have an error, only the truly bad sectors will be lost. A sector is 512 bytes and they are either good or bad. noerror says not to stop just because you hit a failed sector sync says that if you have a bad sector, fill that part of your backup with zeros. As to the restore, it can be as simple as: cat [whatever] > /dev/sdb; sync fyi: I make these kinds of drive backups as part of my job, thus my knowledge of the little known args. Greg -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org