Re: "Cloning" a hard drive...

[Carson Harding <harding_(_at_)_motd_(_dot_)_ca>]

On Thu, Jun 24, 2004 at 12:58:39PM -0700, Matt Provost wrote:
> On Jun 24 11:40 AM, John Draper wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > In an attempt to "clone" a hard drive,   I connected a 2nd empty
> > unformatted drive to my box and started it up.
> > 
> > The command I used...
> > 
> > dd if=/dev/wd0c of=/dev/wd1c bs=1028
> > 
> > Seems to have worked.  I got no errors,  and the operation took about
> > 3 1/2 hours.
> > 
> > I checked the /dev directory,  and confirmed it has a wd1c,  and the
> > 'dmesg' also showed it got detected.
> > 
> > After the copy,  I removed the original one,  replaced it with
> > the cloned one,   but when I tried to boot it up,   I got
> > the "No OS Found" BIOS error.
> > 
> > Next I looked on the drive to try and set it up for "master" mode,
> > but have no clue on what combination of settings I would need.
> > 
> > The drive I'm cloning to is a 40 gb Maxtor,  And the original disk
> > I'm cloning FROM is a Western Digital - both are 40 gb.
> > 
> > I thought about mounting the cloned drive to see if I can find
> > the individual files,  but I just can't find an example of the "mount"
> > command I can use to test this...
> > 
> > I tried:
> > 
> > mount -t ffs /dev/wd1c /mnt/wd1
> > 
> > But it came back with no such file.   Does this mean I have to go into
> > /mnt directory,  and create a mount point directory like this?
> > 
> > cd /dev
> > mkdir wd1
> > 
> > Then do..
> > 
> > mount -t ffs /dev/wd1c /mnt/wd1
> > 
> > I really don't feel good about doing this kind of stuff,  especially 
> > since I
> > don't know what I'm doing,  and can use some help here.
> > 
> > John
> 
> dd is probably fine if the disks are identical, but it doesn't look like
> they are (different brands). I'd use dump and restore instead since it
> just deals with the filesystem and can handle any necessary conversions
> to underlying disks.
> 
> So just dump to stdout from one partition and pipe it to a restore
> pointed at the other one.
> 
> First newfs /dev/wd1c and mount it somewhere, /mnt/tmp or something.
> Then cd into /mnt/tmp and run:
> 
> dump 0f - /dev/wd0c | restore rf -
> 
> or something like that (check the man pages - I can't test it here).
> 
> Matt

- for some reason /dev/wd?c doesn't sound like the right thing; likely
  because that's the whole drive (for the dd attempt, sure; for the 
  dump/restore or for mounting, no).
- you will need to fdisk and disklabel the drive
- you will need to do dump/restore for each slice
- you will need to install boot blocks on that cloned drive (installboot).

In the original case, you tried "mount /dev/wd1c /mnt/wd1", but did you
try "mount /dev/wd1a /mnt/wd1"? (Yes, /mnt/wd1 must exist.)


-- 
Carson Harding - harding (at) motd (dot) ca