On Fri, May 06, 2005 at 04:07:17PM +0300, Alphonse Ogulla wrote: > Hi all, > Can I simply use dd to clone my failing hard disk (hda) onto another > (hdb) of the same size as follows: > > # dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=512
I'd prefer to go another route, any of which would require first creating your partitions on the new HD, but I think any of these might produce a more satisfactory result. 1. I believe I've seen it recommended on this list that you can use "cp" with appropriate options. 2. You could probably do this with "rsync" 3. Personally, I've used tar to recreate the partitions. I'm doing this off the top of my head, so it may not be perfect, but the way to do this would be to first create the partition on the new HD. mount this partition on, say, "/mnt". To duplicate /home, for instance, I'd "cd /home", then issue the command tar --one-file-system -cf - . | tar -C /mnt -xf - (I think this is correct). note that with the --one-file-system option, any partitions mounted under the current structure won't be copied in this pass. You will have to repeat this process for each partition you need to copy unless you wanted to get crafty and perhaps set up a mount system within the "/mnt" structure which duplicates your current system. After a quick "cp --help", I see that it, too has a --one-file-system option, so no doubt you could use an identical strategy using "cp" as with "tar". 4. One other option comes to mind. If time is not of ultimate essence, you might want to consider backing up all personal (non-system) files you wish to keep and then do a re-install. I know this sounds Windows-ish, but this way, you could insure that you do, indeed have a fresh install and none of the system files would be corrupted in the event that you had bad blocks containing any of these files on your old HD. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]