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Re: copying entire hard drive



Pigeon wrote:
On Sun, Oct 12, 2003 at 12:58:41PM -0400, Gerard Ceraso wrote:

I have a hard drive that is going bad so I want to copy it from the old
hard drive to the new one, same hd and everything. I was wondering which
was faster doing dd if=/dev/hdc of=/dev/hda or mounting each partition
and and just using cp.


dd copies the entire drive, including all the blank space. cp won't
copy the blank bits, so that's faster.


dd also copies things like the filesystem metadata and the partition
table.  So if you have an 80 GB drive and dd it to 120 GB drive, you
would need to utilize some utility to grow or resize your filesystem,
or otherwise utilize the leftover free space.  Of course, if your
destination drive is smaller, that could be a problem.

-Roberto

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