On 8/8/05, David Thomas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I'm with Carl on this. Particularly if you're on a Red Hat-distributed
> kernel (and it's associated modules), you should have very little
> trouble.
>
> Are the disks the same size too, or are the new ones a tiny bit larger?
> If you want them to be truly identical, by far the easiest thing is to
> follow this procedure:
>
> Mount both hard drives on the same system. Boot from a live CD (is
> that what Knoppix does? I dunno, I know Gentoo will work like a charm).
>
> Don't mount either disk. Then run:
> dd if=[src disk] of=[dest disk] bs=1024
> ex:
> dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=1024
>
> This will copy every byte of data on the src to the dest. Don't think
> you even need to set the active / bootable flag on the destination boot
> partition since MBR and all are the same.
>
> In this scenarion, _EVERYTHING_ is mirrored, even inode access
> timestamps are preserved, this can be useful for forensics.
>
> The only limitation is that the partitions will not match the natural
> cylinder boundary. If you're highly dependent on disk performance and
> the original disk is carefully laid out according to disk zones and
> their application (nobody I know does this), you might notice.
>
> Lots of other approaches, lemme know if you want me to elaborate, you
> might even get when they're root mounted. :
To a first approximation, disk drives have not had user-available
natural cylinder boundaries for perhaps 20 years. Ever since the disk
manufacturers learned that they could increase the storage capacity by
storing the bits at constant linear density. That is, use more
sectors per revolution at the outer edge of the disk, where the
circumference is about twice what it is at the inner edge of the
useful area.
This is known as zoned storage. Information about the layout of the
zones was sometimes available for high-end SCSI disks, but I haven't
seen any such zone layout for the current generation of disk drives.
Everything that you do to address a disk drive is pure fiction, except
for the total number of available blocks.
carl
--
carl lowenstein marine physical lab u.c. san diego
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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