All, I have had a few bad blocks show up on my laptop hard-drive. I have a new drive (larger) and I would like to duplicate/clone my entire drive by attaching the new drive to the laptop through the usb port, booting from the openSuSE install disk and then using dd to clone the old drive to new. Having never attempted a clone-by-usb, I don't even know if that is possible with the software on the install CD. So before spending a couple of hours to find out it won't work, I'll ask the brain-trust: (1) Does the install CD provide sufficient USB connection capability to attach a second drive by USB and make the device available to receive the contents of the original using dd? (2) presuming I can get the usb drive up as /dev/sdb (or wherever it end up), can anyone suggest any further optimizations for the dd clone beyond: dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=4096 conv=notrunc,noerror,sync -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org