On Dec 28, 2007 10:43 PM, Raj Kiran Grandhi <
grajkiran@gmail.com
> wrote:
Max Hyre wrote:
>> Amit Uttamchandani wrote:
>>
>> If you are planning on having the same partition size for your root
>> partition, then you can simply use dd to clone the entire parition.
>>
>> Actually, the dd method will work even if you want to have a larger
>> partition on your new drive.
>
> Couldn't you simply dd the entire drive (dd if=/dev/hda of=hdb), then
> use parted to enlarge and adjust things to fit the new size?
You might be able to, but it involves more effort, consumes more time
and is not as reliable as cloning partitions. Say you want to clone an
80GB disk with four paritions of 20GB each onto a 160GB disk with four
partitions of 40GB each. If you were to clone the entire disk, you will
end up with four partitions on the 160GB disk which use only the first
80GB. The remaining 80GB may be inaccessible if the existing partitions
are all primary. Even otherwise, there is no point in mucking about with
moving the data around after cloning.