Re: Using dd to clone smaller drive to larger drive

[Brian C <brianwc@berkeley.edu>]

Warning to archive readers. I believe a typo in one of the commands 
below will destroy your data. Read on...

Alvin Oga wrote:
[snip]

> - if you want to leave bad data behind
>
> mount /dev/hdb1 /mnt/new-disk

HERE IT COMES

> 	tar cvfp old-disk-paritions /mnt/new-disk

DON'T TYPE THE ABOVE. I interpreted it to mean type:
	tar cvfp /dev/hda3 /mnt/new-disk/var

(and so I had mounted /dev/hdb3 to /mnt/new-disk/var)

Now my original /var which was on /dev/hda3 appears to be completely 
gone. Since *this* was my attempt to back up this data, this is very 
bad. I had BIND running chrooted in /var/lib/named/etc/bind but now 
there don't appear to be such directories (/var is completely empty). I 
have THOSE files backed up, but the rest of var is probably not backed 
up. I'd be pleased if anyone could explain what happened. And more 
pleased if someone explained a way to recover. I should mention that 
while /var appears empty when you cd in there, df shows it 100% full. 
What gives? Thanks.

Brian

> 	sync
> umount /mnt/new-disk
>
> boot the new disk with a floppy or bootable cdrom 
> and rerun grub/lilo on the new disk
[snip]