Thanks for the tips, Horst and KBob. I tried running a disk duplication last night before I went to bed but this morning I was disappointed to find it hadn't worked.
I had mistakenly issued the command "dd if=/dev/hda of=/hdb" and ended up filling my root partition completely so that dd aborted after 30 min. Fortunately Debian itself didn't crash and I was able to delete the file "hdb". I will try it again tonight before bedtime. I figure it will take several hours to duplicate my 40 GB drive. Which block size do you think I should use to improve the speed? Is bigger better? Another thing that I am concerned about is how dd handles the occurrence of unusable (marked bad) sectors on the target drive? Does this potential shifting of block locations mess up the partition tables or file systems? And wouldn't it decreases the total capacity of the drive by a few blocks? For example, let's say the source drive has 10008 usable blocks but target drive has only 10005 usable blocks, so dd ends up with an extra 3 blocks and nowhere to put them. Also, how are bad sectors tracked, is it done by the hard drive itself, by the harddisk controller, or by the operating system? Ever since SMART hard drives came along I've been confused about this. Does Linux support SMART? Dex _______________________________________________ Eug-LUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.efn.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/eug-lug
