Not to quibble, Marc, but your suggestion copies a filesystem, not a drive.
It's still a good suggestion ... if the old drive has bad blocks, Jimmy
probably doesn't really want to do a drive copy, and what you suggest will
do most of what he needs ... at least for ext2 partitions.
The new drive will not have a working LILO or other booter -- after
installing it, he'll need to boot from a rescue disk, then run lilo on the
new drive, to make it bootable.
And if he uses a swap file, he'll need to make that --- actually, he'll need
to make all the partitions on the new drive using fdisk/cfdisk, then create
filesystems with mke2fs or equivalent and swap with mkswap, before he does
the mounting and taring you advise.
With these additions, your advice is good.
At 06:22 PM 1/2/00 +0100, Marc Mutz wrote:
>Jimmy Thomson wrote:
>> this may be a bit off topic, but can anyone recommend a piece of software
>> that I can boot off of a floppy and that can clone one hard drive to
>> another? I don't need the ability to network clone them, I just want to
>> be able to take an existing drive (that is developing some bad blocks) and
>> blow it over to a new drive.
>Take the rescue floppy of your dirstribution, boot it and use tar like
>this:
>
>root# mkdir /mnt{,/{hda1,hdb1}}
>root# mount -t ext2 /{dev,mnt}/hda1
>root# mount -t ext2 /{dev,mnt}/hda2
>root# tar cfp - -C /mnt/hda1 . | tar xfp - -C /mnt/hda2
------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"---
Ray Olszewski -- Han Solo
Palo Alto, CA [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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