Re: [gentoo-amd64] Re: Cloning a system drive

[Brian Litzinger <brian@worldcontrol.com>]

On Sun, Oct 07, 2007 at 12:49:11AM -0400, Peter Davoust wrote:
> This may be a little noobish, and it may have been said, but can't you
> just install the new drive, partition it identically to the original
> drive and then...
> 
> dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/dev/hdb1
> dd if=/dev/hda2 of=/dev/hdb2
> 
> so on and so forth until you've got everything copied? Or event just
> 
> dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb
> 
> Wouldn't that work?

The latter works fine in my experience.  I do it regularly.

The downside, is that cloning a 750GB drive takes a while
as it duplicates everything including unused sectors.

Things like clonezilla just copy the "used"/active sectors.

A popular way is to use sfdisk.  I do not remember the exact
syntax, but a pair of sfdisk commands can transfer the partition
information directly between two drives.

Then use rsync to move the data across.

You may have to run grub setup on the new disk too.

-- 
Brian Litzinger
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