On Sun, Feb 13, 2005 at 09:12:35PM -0700, Allasso Travesser wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I would like to clone my Debian Woody system onto a second larger hard disk.
> It seems to me that it would just be a matter of cleaning off the second
> disk, partioning using fdisk, and then running:
>
> dd if=/dev/hdc of=/dev/hda
>
> where hdc is the drive from which I am copying my current system, and hda is
> the drive I want to put this system on.
>
> current hdc partition table (2 Gb disk):
>
> Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
> /dev/hdc1 1 13 52384+ 83 Linux
> /dev/hdc2 14 449 1757952 83 Linux
> /dev/hdc3 450 523 298368 82 Linux swap
>
> How I plan to partition hda (30 Gb disk):
>
> Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
> /dev/hda1 1 13 52384 83 Linux
> /dev/hda2 14 3704 29647957+ 83 Linux
> /dev/hda3 3705 523 298368 82 Linux swap
>
> Can anyone see anything wrong with this, or would you tell me anything I
> should watch out for? Anything I should find out about my current system
> first? It seems that this could be fatal if it is not done right.
>
> Thank you, Allasso
>
Hi Allasso,
I was in a similar situation (not for cloning but in order to make
backups), and I chose another approach which also should work for you.
First, you 'init 1' to go to single user mode, a thing which I don't bother
with for my backups, and then I do an rsync of all the partitions I need
to backup. I also went through this procedure in order to clone a system,
so it _does_ work. Just make sure to use 'rsync -ax' ('a' for archive
and 'x' to stay within the current file system.
Now to the reasons why I chose rsync over dd for this method. First it
allows for an easy re-run (only needed for backup purposes), but more
importantly, you don't have to care about partition sizes, e.g. what
happens if you dd your hdc2 to hda2? I remember doing a dd for
cloning and running into problems because of this.
Anyway, just my 0.02 Euro
Andreas
--
Andreas Rippl -- I prefer encrypted mail
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