Re: How to savely copy a disk?

[Martyn Pearce <m.pearce@inpharmatica.co.uk>]

Martin Fluch writes:
| AFAIK dd can make the copied data useless, when the target hd isn't
| identicaly to the source hd (and with identicaly I mean it: same geometry
| and partitioned in the exact same way).
| 
| ext2 partitions can easyly moved along with tar, and for swap partitions
| it makes no sense to copy them.
| 
| vfat/winNT partitions seem to me mor tricky (I've never did that)

Hm, this discussion moved off the list.
I later qualified the dd suggestion with the observation that it should
work iff both disks are set to LBA.  Otherwise, as you say, dissimilar
geometries will sink (almost always).  In the LBA case, one shouldn't
even need to rerun LILO, I think.  In the non-LBA case, the partitions
must be re-created on the target disk, and the partitions copied
one-by-one.

The LBA case is as you say wasteful on swap partitions, but the speed of 
convenience should more than make up for this.

Mx.