I myself mirror with dd for years now and never had any trouble with the physical drive. The only trouble one may run into is disk geometry. this breaks LiLo,fdisk,BIOS... . To go around this pick the autodetected BIOS geometry for your source drive and type it in for the the destination drive. There you are, be aware that different BIOS may detect the geometry different, even primary and secondary bus may do lead to different values. To all of you who need more speed try buffer(1) it does what dd does with two processes and shared menory. Unfortunately it eats more CPU time than dd so with a fast drive and gzip you may loose performance. Jens Michaelsen Der Herr Hofrat schrieb: > > > > Yes. It is called dd(1). If you have a secondary drive you want to > > copy to: > > > > $ dd if=/dev/hd[source drive] of=/dev/hd[dest drive] bs=1024k > > ie: if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdc > > > > Will copy the hard drive, boot sector and all, to a similar (or larger) > > hard drive. You should boot to single-user mode first (although if you > > don't it won't cause problems). If you mess up the if= and of= args, it > > is all over. Upon bootup, it will fsck the first time, then everything > > is good. > > > only do this if the disks involved are absolutly identical , the harddisk > has a area on it were it stores its geometry and translation data, this > area is NOT standardized and if you overwrtie it with wrong values you > can completly kill a harddisk, that is , it will not even be formatable > or accessible by ANY tool. generaly if the disks are from the same series > (let say QUANTUM BIGFOOT 1.2 and 2.1 GB) then you should be able to disk > dump the smaller to the larger. an almost guearantied killer is disk dumping > a segate-scsi onto a maxtor-scsi, after doing this you can through it away ! > so be carfull with dd.... > > concerning the bs= argument , the fastest blocksize is if you take the > on disk cache/8 , a too big bs will be just as slow as the default 512 bytes > > hofrat > -- [rtl] --- > To unsubscribe: > echo "unsubscribe rtl" | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] OR > echo "unsubscribe rtl <Your_email>" | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] > --- > For more information on Real-Time Linux see: > http://www.rtlinux.org/rtlinux/ -- [rtl] --- To unsubscribe: echo "unsubscribe rtl" | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] OR echo "unsubscribe rtl <Your_email>" | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- For more information on Real-Time Linux see: http://www.rtlinux.org/rtlinux/
