Re: Best way to duplicate HDs
Hello All
I am not sure that I understand what the original poster wishes to
achieve, nor have I followed the lengthy discussions that ensued.
But, a thread with the above subject line would not be complete
without a mention of "mirrordir".
Someone wrote:
> > Sigh... and I was hoping for a simple solution like cp /mnt/disk1/*
> > /mnt/disk2/
Try
apt-get install mirrordir
mirrordir /mnt/sourcedisk /mnt/targetdisk
Everything including soft links, hard links, devices files, fifo's,
permissions etc, will be mirrored, with a minimum of changes on
the target disk.
Mind that you do not mix up the "source" and "target" paths,
otherwise you will end up wiping your original drive.
If you want to "ghost" a complete linux file system to replace a small
drive with a larger one, the recipe is this:
- power down and install the target disk on secondary port, reboot.
- partition target disk (fdisk, cfdisk).
- create file systems (mkfs) and swap partion (mkswap) on the
target disk.
- mount the target disk on /mnt
- create and mount points and mount other partitions on target drive
(eg mkdir /mnt/boot, mount /dev/hdc1 /mnt/boot).
- change into single user mode (init s)
- mirror the drive, "mirrordir --exclude /mnt -exclude /proc / /mnt"
(These excludes save a lot of trouble)
- mkdir /mnt/proc, mkdir /mnt/mnt (This also save a lot of problems
later).
- power down and remove original disk
- reboot with the target disk mounted as root / using an external
recovery disk.
- run install-mbr to put a boot record on the target
- run lilo to make the target bootable.
- reboot.
The original poster could probably achieve what he wants by
running the "mirrordir" statement from crontab every 24 hours.
Have fun
Ian
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Ian Forbes ZSD
http://www.zsd.co.za
Office: +27 21 683-1388 Fax: +27 21 674-1106
Snail Mail: P.O. Box 46827, Glosderry, 7702, South Africa
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