Re: disk duplication question

[Alvin Oga <aoga@Mail.Linux-Consulting.com>]

hi ya


> IF (and only if) the drives are geometrically the same, you can use dd:
> 
> dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb

you can specify only to copy the first 1Mb if that is the smaller
partition to be copied to the new disk ...

-- problem(??) with dd for copying it copies the good and bad block data
   from the original disk to the new disk....

-- dd also copies stuff...you dont care about....if the partition is 90%
   used..dd might be okay...but if the partition is only 10% used...use
   tar to copy stuff instead of dd
 
> > I would like to duplicate a hard drive that has Debian
> > installed to use of several additional computers.
> > 
> > I can write a script which does:
> > 
> >   sfdisk to partition the new drive;
> >   mke2fs to make file systems on the new drive;
> >   mkswap to initialize the swap area on the new drive;
> >   cd old-partition; find . -mount | cpio -pdm /new-partition
> >          (for each partition).

	lilo  -C /etc/lilo.clone.conf

i would use   fdisk instead of sfdisk...

	http://www.linux-consulting.com/Boot/fdisk.simple.sh.txt

than to clone it... ( ie all the steps you specified above )

	http://www.linux-consulting.com/Boot/clone.sh.txt

have fun linuxing
alvin

> > 
> > But then to finish it seems I need to boot the new computer
> > (after installing the new drive) with a boot floppy and
> > run lilo by hand.
> > 
> > Is there some way to also install the stuff that lilo does
> > on the new drive?  The new machines will not usually have
> > a floppy so I would like to avoid that step.
> > 
> > thanks,
> > Stuart