[CentOS] A questiong about replacing my failing drive

Sun Jun 12 13:27:13 UTC 2005
Mark Weaver <mdw1982 at mdw1982.com>

Steve Huff wrote:
> 
> On Jun 12, 2005, at 8:45 AM, Mark Weaver wrote:
> 
>> Since a Unix/Linux guru/admin is what I want to be when I grow up,  
>> (my wife tells me thats not likely to happen - me growing up), I  
>> would love to hear about your process.
> 
> 
> one technique that works quickly and simply for *cloning* disks (i.e.  
> you've got one disk that's already partitioned, has data on it, etc.  
> and you've got another of the same make and model, and you want two  
> exact copies) is to use dd.  since it's a block-level operation, it  
> couldn't care less about whatever sorts of filesystems you've put on  
> the disk, it'll preserve the MBR and whatever bootloader you may have  
> there, and so forth.
> 
> 1. install source disk and target disk in a machine (hooray for hot- 
> swap bays!)
> 2. boot from CD or from other disk (i.e. *not* the target disk) into  
> single-user mode
> 3. dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sdc bs=1024 (source disk is /dev/sdb,  target 
> is /dev/sdc)
> 
> -steve

yikes! that could be a potential problem for some of the "older" disks 
I've got lying around. apart from that it just seems too easy to be 
true, although that would be the mule in me looking for the hard way to 
do things. AWESOME! info...thanks.

-- 
Mark
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