Re: Hard Drive copies

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Author: Craig White
Date:  
To: plug-discuss
Subject: Re: Hard Drive copies
On Mon, 2005-01-31 at 01:13 -0700, der.hans wrote:
> Am 31. Jan, 2005 schwätzte Michael so:
>
> > Is it possible under Linux to copy, mirror, .iso a hard drive to a hard
> > drive and do so to a bootable state? I have a friend who would like to
> > copy (Norton Ghost) a drive to another under Linux, but I am unsure
> > how to do this as I have always installed to a drive.
>
> For GNU/Linux ( and probably most *NIXen ) this works quite well.
>
> Make a partition on the new drive big enough to hold the old drive and use
> dd. Not the best way, but it works if neither partition is mounted.
>
> dd if=/dev/$oldpartition of=/dev/$newpartition
>
> Hmm, there are some projects for this, but I can't figure out what they
> are.
>
> Here are notes I'm using for a similar process for copying to many similar
> boxen. I'm using tar to make the copies. --atime-preserve is an important
> option for the process. They weren't meant for someone else to read, but
> if you wait for me to fix them up it'll be several days if not several
> weeks, so you get the raw notes now :).
>
> ###
> partitioned new drive:
>         linux partition first, making it a primary partition and giving it
> most of the drive and leaving about 128MB for swap
>         swap as a primary partition as well, giving it the rest of the
> drive
>         change type for swap partition to be swap
>         marked linux partition as bootable
> mkfs.ext3 on linux partition
>         mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda1
> mkswap on swap partition
>         mkswap /dev/sda2
> mount linux partition
>         mount /dev/sda1 /media/usb0
> if copying to multiple partitions have them all mounted up prior to the
> copy
> if copying from multiple partitions reuse the below and adjust for the
> secondary partitions
>         cd /; tar -cf - --exclude="./home/*" --exclude="./tmp/*"
> --exclude="./var/tmp/*"--exclude="./var/run/*" --atime-preserve -l . | tar
> -xf - -C /media/usb0/ 2>&1 | tee /tmp/tar.out
> there might be a couple of warnings about not copying sockets, but they
> can be ignored
> use '.' rather than '*' in conjunction with '-l' for tar to avoid picking
> up secondary partitions
> space used on old and new partitions should be about the same
> need to copy /.dev to the new dev dir
>         cp -pr /media/usb0/.dev/* /media/usb0/dev/
> fsck the new partition? Haven't been doing this.
>         e2fsck -y /dev/sda1
> fix new fstab if necessary
> install grub in boot partition
>         grub-install --recheck --root-directory=/media/usb0 /dev/sda
> ###

>
> I've done this type of thing many times in the past with GNU/Linux
> systems. Up until the udev issue I mentioned on the last week this has
> always worked quite well.
>
> Another trick is necessary if he's copying the boot drive and using lilo.

----
dd is very cool and an effective tool most of the time - does have a
slight learning curve though

I would suggest looking at ghost 4 linux
<https://sourceforge.net/projects/g4l>

trying to be like the norton version only it's free...

Craig

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