> > > 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? > > > > It should take 1-2 hours, if you have all the right hdparm settings. > > Using Debian's default settings (copied below) it took 11.5 hours. > > # hdparm /dev/hda > > /dev/hda: > multcount = 0 (off) > I/O support = 0 (default 16-bit) > unmaskirq = 0 (off) > using_dma = 0 (off) > keepsettings = 0 (off) > nowerr = 0 (off) > readonly = 0 (off) > readahead = 8 (on) > geometry = 4865/255/63, sectors = 78165360, start = 0 > busstate = 1 (on)
I ran a complete drive mirror/backup again last night using the following optimized hdparms and idebus=66. It took 4.5 hours. # hdparm /dev/hda /dev/hda: multcount = 16 (on) I/O support = 1 (32-bit) unmaskirq = 0 (off) using_dma = 0 (off) keepsettings = 0 (off) nowerr = 0 (off) readonly = 0 (off) readahead = 8 (on) geometry = 4865/255/63, sectors = 78165360, start = 0 busstate = 1 (on) All the copied partitions checked out OK with "fsck -f" and all 3 linuxen booted successfully. Hooray! The only problem I encountered was that Debian turned off the hard drive DMA feature after encountering several errors the first time I ran dd. When I ran it again with dd turned off it worked fine. (Note: both my Intel motherboard and my Western Digital hard drives are relatively new, about a year old, and should have no problem supporting dma transfers. Even my BIOS reports both drives as being PIO Mode 5, UDMA100.) Here is the command I used: "time dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=1k" I figured that the smaller block size would be better since there was no speed difference from using a larger block size anyway. Dexter _______________________________________________ Eug-LUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.efn.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/eug-lug
