My situation is a bit different - I'm copying between identical drives. I wonder if geometry translation might be a factor?
Also, are both drives IDE and on the same channel (both Primary or both Secondary)? Given you're reporting hda and hdc I suspect no. The other device on the channel (like a slow CD) will limit the disk to it's limit, so maybe that's slowing down hdc in your case. I copy hda to hdc, but I have no hdb or hdd at the same time, so both channels run at the disk's full speed(s). My 20G disk copies in 2 hours and 40 minutes. I've experimented with different bs= settings, and haven't noted much variance between them. I run "date; dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdc bs=16384k; date". Someone suggested I use "time" but my Tom's RootBoot diskette doesn't include "time". Cheers, Bret On Mon, 2003-12-15 at 10:58, Simon Males wrote: > Im copying 40g drive onto a 120g drive. I am using a CD live type linux > distro. > > using the command > > # dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdc bs=2048k > > The thing is I dont know if its working, dd gives no active feedback. I > dont think i could even ^C it. I left it running for some >12hrs, hard > reboot, jumped back to fdisk and a partition table was written of some > sort (well there was a hdc1 now, just like how there was only hda1). It > was fresh from the shop, so the disk was completely blank. > > First time i tried, while dd was running I did a `fdisk -l /dev/hdc` and > I was given constant hdc errors. So basically can I query the > destination the disk and see...something?! > > Further, is > > # cat /dev/hda > /dev/hdc > > slower than doing the above dd command? I've had cat running for around > 22hrs now. > > I have a little theory that running top may freeze the process, because > since running top once, the dd or cat process cpu time has not changed. > > -- > Simon Males <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > No More AOL CDs Australia - www.anticd.org -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
