Re: cloning hard disk
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.
The biggest problem is that it won't do what you're expecting it to do.
Going through the excercise of partitioning the new disk will be a
wasted effort. The command 'dd if=/dev/hdc of=/dev/hda' will simply wipe
out that new partition table while copying the the old partition table
(and everything else) over to the new disk, byte for byte. So you will
end up, at best, with the same 2 GB worth of partitions on the 30 GB
disk, just like you have on the old disk.
You'd be much better off looking into one of the suggestions in the
other posts here - using 'cp' or 'rsync' etc.
Tom
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