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,
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