Re: Clone GPT partition table - with Lenny ?

[Neal Murphy <neal.p.murphy@alum.wpi.edu>]

Other than not being fully automated, what would be wrong with:
  - use dd to copy the first 10MiB of the old drive to the new,
  - use dd to skip all but the last 10MiB of the old drive and seek to the
    same spot on the new drive
  - use dd if=/dev/zero to zero the first MiB of each partition.
That *should* guarantee that the partition structure is copied from the old 
drive to the new and that no partition contains RAID IDs. You have to think 
about what you're doing, but it should work and allow mdadm to equalize to the 
new drive.

Also, unless I'm mistaken, neither hard drives nor hard drive controllers have 
used CHS in many years, mostly because CHS has not been constant across the 
platter(s) in about as many years. Far as I know, only partitioning tools 
gripe about CHS alignment. It's why I stopped using fdisk, sfdisk and other 
ancient partitioners. And I came close to scrapping parted because it can't do 
simple arithmetic; but using 'unit s' works well enough, provided I do all the 
begin/end computations outside of parted.

N