Matt wrote:
> I have a 500GB Sata drive about 15% used I would like to make an exact
> copy of too another Sata 500GB drive as a spare. That way if
> something happens to the one in service I can plug in the spare
> quickly and restore one of the weekly backups without reinstalling the
> entire OS and all the little tweaks of setup on this mail/web server.
>
> How do I do this? That is make an exact bootable copy of a linux
> drive. Its running Centos 4.6 if that matters.
>
brute force approach...
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=16384
that will copy the whole physical drive. I would do this in single
user mode (init 1) for best results, as any changes to the file system
while a copy is in progress will be inconsistent