On Monday 09 May 2005 01:54 pm, Daniel Timpson wrote: > > In either case, it may be best to do the copy from a live cd or other os, > > rather than copying out from under a live system. > > Yes I agree. This is how I did it. Are there other tools that work > at the file system level that are good? Does drive geometry play any > part in this at all?
Sort of, but not really. When you dd from hda to hdc, you are also copying the first block which contains the boot loader and partition table. This is usually fine for modern OSes bootloaders (grub and lilo). Fat stores drive geometry in the partition header, IIRC, but should still work--it may just prevent older MS oses (98x) from seeing the entire drive. Since you did a verbatim copy, everything will be in the same place--since IIRC even the windows loader uses LBA addressing. As for Linux, it doesn't care what's in the boot block once it's up and running. It gets the drive geometry from the drive itself, not what's written on it. Unless you've used up all 4 primary partition entries, or your 4th is an fs type that can't be enlarged, you should be able to make use of the additional 20GBs as well. As for other tools that work at the file system level, I'm not sure this is what you really want in this case--since you just wanted to transfer the entire thing over wholesale, once. If you want to make an image of the system to deploy multiple times, then a tool that works at the file system level might be better since they can use less space and be more flexible as far as target drives/sizes/etc. I've never done it, but my dad loves ghost (not sure if it does ext2, but I vaguely think it can now). It has so many features that my dad raves about that I can't remember any ;) (All I remember is that it is really flexible.) If ghost doesn't cut in a linux world yet, there is always tar + gzip... -- Respectfully, Nicholas Leippe Sales Team Automation, LLC 1335 West 1650 North, Suite C Springville, UT 84663 +1 801.853.4090 http://www.salesteamautomation.com .===================================. | This has been a P.L.U.G. mailing. | | Don't Fear the Penguin. | | IRC: #utah at irc.freenode.net | `==================================='
