On Saturday, 2009-04-25 at 10:22 -0400, peby@sagonet.com wrote:
David is totally correct about dd being the way to go - one slightly better way to go though is ddrescue with does a much better job at recovering the salvageable sections first, then retrying the bad sector areas. You can also use a log file so the operation can be resumed if interrupted, etc.
I have to disagree.
Not unless you have to do an fsck on the image, or if there are bad areas which you try to recover. The old HD is still working, and there is a full backup.
And even in that case, a file copy works fine, it will simply fail on broken files, which can then be recovered from the backup instead.
Not to forget, there is clonezilla, specifically made for this situation: replacing a HD, cloning a system.
- -- Cheers, Carlos E. R.
Carlos, Clonezilla is file system aware - and does not work on LVM, it simply falls back to dd anyway in that case, and he might well be using LVM if he used the default partitioning of a newer distro. If there are bad sectors (which in this case it appears there are) using a block copy method might be a better way to go and could potentially even recover a read error on a sector where as rsync certainly will not. It is also possibly rsync will simply fail depending on the number of bad sectors, etc. Either way will work, but why worry about partitioning, rsyncing, read errors and recovery from backups when one command will likely accomplish it all? ddrescue /dev/sda /dev/sdb. Done. Pete -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org