[rescue] somewhat OT: copying a complete HD to another one..

[Caleb Shay]

On 2004-03-19 11:43:11 -0500 Kay <sunfriek at ussonet.net> wrote:

> im trying to duplicate on HD to another , both Hard drives are the 
> same size
> 
> whats the easiest way to do it?

dd if=/dev/drive0 of=/dev/drive1

This will be SLOW.  I've experimented with several options to dd 
depending on the cache size on the drive I've gotten decent speed 
with:

dd if=/dev/drive0 bs=1M | dd bs=1M | dd bs=1M | dd of=/dev/drive1 bs=1M

This basically gives you a small buffer that helps deal with the 
differences between read/write speeds on the drives.  This was with 
drives that had 1MB caches. If you've got some fancy 8MB cache drives 
or tiny 512K cache drives you might want to try playing with the 
value.

Obviously drive0/1 should point to your actual drive device (NOT 
partition/slice) and this will work better if the drives are on 
different busses.

I used a knoppix CD and a stack of identical drives to duplicate a 
Windows 2000 installation this way.

Cheers,

Caleb Shay
caleb at webninja.com