Urgent: Copy hda to hdb with dd?

Sat, 23 Mar 2002 23:41:37 -0500

The urgent need has past but this is turning into an interesting learning experience.

Let me wind the time clock back for those that care to follow.

Situation: Four identical computers assembled from identical components.
Goal: Install Windows 2000 with NTFS and all the same apps on all the computers.
Plan: Install everything on one computer then duplicate that drive to the other three drives that way configuration and installation only has to happen once.

The hard drive manufacturer's downloadable tool for cloning drives will not work on Windows 2000.  This was discovered after first hard drive was nearly completely setup.

Solution idea: Install the finished hard drive and a blank one in the same computer (hda and hdb) and use LNX-BBC, running Linux on the CD and using the "dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb" command to copy the drives.

This solution depended on LNX-BBC being able to handle NTFS and DMA-100, 40GB drives (and me being smart enough to do the command correctly).

Result: After five hours it was deamed to have taken too long (DMA-100 IDE drives on a 1.6GHZ PC) and the command was aborted.  When the formally fully installed drive was allowed to boot the computer, Windows 2000 complained about a paging file that was missing or too small.  This error could not be recovered from using all usual automated repair methods provided by MS.

Booting LNX-BBC again I noted that I had to load the NTFS driver before I could mount the partition.  I did not load the driver before doing the dd command, assuming that dd acted on the media, not the file system (wrong assumption?).  Mounting the NTFS partition on the now bad drive worked fine and key directories and files appeared intact.

At this point I don't know what went wrong but, given the opportunity to try again I would:
-Follow Bill's advice below and connect the drives as hda and hdc.
-Load the NTFS driver before attempting the dd command.
-Give the process more time.

AND, before the next attempt, I will have studied the dd command more!

Sorry, that came out much longer than I intended!  I welcome any edificating comments.

Alan

On 23 Mar 2002 20:43:11 -0700 Bill Warner <wwarner@direct-alliance.com> wrote:

I have done this many times, although not in quite some time.  there
should not have been any trouble with it messing up the first drive at
all.  You also should not have it mounted when you do it or it will boot
fist time and say it is an unclean system and run fsck.

I saw in a hack Tivo site that someone hacked a progress meter into dd
because this was one of the only ways to backup the tivo hard drives
when they first started hacking them.

it does take along time.  one suggestin I would have is put them on
sperate busses hda->hdb not the best hda->hdc would be much better and
about twice as fast.

if you fear causeing issues with destroying your primary drive then log
in as root with your boot disk and make a user.  make sure the user only
has read access to hda and give him full access to hdc.

hope this helps some

Bill Warner