Help cloning hard drive

[Nessa]

I'm running the livecd...

dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=4096 conv=notrunc,noerror

^Gives me a message: dd: opening `/dev/hda': Permission denied

Help please... I need to copy EVERYTHING to a new/larger drive...

[justleen]

try a sudo dd?

[justleen]

ohw, duh!

you must supply a number aswel!

/dev/hda1 for example!

you can never use a whole "drive" you must supply argument as to what partition.

dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/dev/hdb1 bs=4096 conv=notrunc,noerror

[Nessa]

sudo dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=4096 conv=notrunc,noerror

I didn't get an error. Now it's on that blinking cursor thing. Based on System Monitor, the cpu and memory are doing something. Do I just wait?

[justleen]

yep, just wait..


(did you check the size of hdb1?)

you can open a new terminal, and type "top" it will tell you wether dd is working or not

in yet antoher new terminal, type "watch vmstat -d" for the disk activity

[Nessa]

Wheeee! It's moving, it's moving! *crosses fingers* I really hope this works...

[psusi]

Are hda and hdb the exact same drive make and model? If not then you don't want to use dd. Heck, there really is no reason to use dd even if they are. It will be faster to just format the new drive, mount both the old and the new, and cp -a all of the files over. You don't even need a livecd; you can just do it from recovery mode.

[Nessa]

No they're not. Read up. The new drive is bigger like I mentioned. Does cp -a copies files and partitions?

[justleen]

the make and model have ab-so-lu-ty nothing to do with dd...

How bout me creating a dd image piped trough vdump onto a tape drive??
or me tranfsering a created boot image to a floppy/usb/cd?

cp -a is not the same, since it will not do a bit by bit transfer..

and as far as the live cd is concernd, for neither cp or dd do you need to enter rescue mode or the live cd.. its perfectly ok to just mount the drive, and copy/dd to the new drive from a "live" system. (yes, al the the stuff /proc might complain... but it works nevertheless)



true, in this he could have copied, but dd does the trick just as well..

[Nessa]

I'm running Ubuntu from the new drive set to master. I see the unallocated space since this IS a bigger drive. I edited my .conkyrc to add "-1" to /media/disk so it would show the proper free space in the ext3 storage partition. The rest remain allocated. Will make some changes later.

Is this good enough? What else do I need to test before I wipe out my old drive?