Dave Lers wrote:
>
> On Sat, 29 Jul 2000, kf wrote:
> > On Sat, 29 Jul 2000, Charles A Edwards wrote:
> > = ----- Original Message -----
> > = From: "fasi74" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
> > = > I want to copy my whole harddrive including MBR & all operating systems
> > = > present on that drive.
> > = > On an harddrive that is not as same as this harddrive in capacity.
> > = > is there some software like this ?
> > = >
> > = If it is a new hd retail box there should be software on the included floppy
>
> > I've done this with floppies before, but never with hard drives, so I'm
> > not guaranteeing anything at all... you're on your own with the results.
> > Having said that, you might try
> >
> > dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=512 count=XXXX
>
> > I'd be very curious to know if this works for you.
>
> A simple
>
> dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdc
>
> works great, super backup method, all you need to do is swap drives
> (plug hdc in where hda was). You want both drives as master, 1 per
> channel. The drive you are writing to needs to be the same size or
> bigger. Since my drives are almost identical I haven't played with,
> don't know how to, utilize extra space if copying to a noticeably
> larger drive.
This should work fine *if* the new drive is bigger and the block sizes
are the same, but you would want to copy off the first xx bytes
someplace safe and copy them back in case they contain drive geometry
(some drives store this _on_ the drive).
But it is perfectly safe to partition them each the same, with extra
space left at the end to use later as you see fit, and use dd to copy
each partition, and then set up the MBR anew.
Of course, that's not what you asked for . . .
>
> There's also a disk upgrade howto, for copying over to a bigger drive,
> ( http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/mini/Hard-Disk-Upgrade.html ) that I
> used with reasonable success (I messed up somewhere but was able to
> recover). Its not simple and straight forward, there's got to be a
> better way.
>
> Note: I've only used these methods with Linux only disks
>
> Ghost worked great on my windows disk but I couldn't get it to work on
> my Linux disk.
--
"Brian, the man from babble-on" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Brian T. Schellenberger http://www.babbleon.org
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