On Sun, Oct 30, 2005 at 03:15:56PM -0500, Marty wrote: > I plan to mirror then replace a hard drive, using an identical model drive. > > Instead of a device-device copy e.g. "cp /dev/hda /dev/hdb" I hope to do > "cp <old drive> image" followed by cp image <new drive>" where "image" is > a disk image file of the original drive. > > Will the physical sector arrangment be preserved using the intermediate image > file, or is that only possible with the device-device copy? I'm asking here > because don't have the identical drives available to test my theory beforehand. [Assumption, current hard drive is hda, CD-ROM is hdc] If the drives are *exactly* identical, you can move your old drive to be the slave on the secondary ide channel, which makes it hdd. Then place the new drive on hda. Boot Knoppix, or another suitable live CD distro, and then do this: dd if=/dev/hdd of=/dev/hda Make absolutely 100% sure that hdd contains the old drive and hda the new drive, or you will obliterate your data with garbage. Also, make sure that you specify `if' and `of' correctly, since `i' and `o' are next to each other on a qwerty keyboard. If you would like to this reasonably quickly, I would recommend enabling DMA on the drives after booting. I believe that Knoppix leaves it off by default since it can cause problems in some rare cases. -Roberto -- Roberto C. Sanchez http://familiasanchez.net/~roberto
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