Or you could boot up with knoppix or some other livecd so the filesystem is not in use and mount both drives and do a: mkdir /mnt/org mount /dev/hdx /mnt/org mkdir /mnt/bckup mount /dev/hdx /mnt/bckup cp -af /mnt/org/* /mnt/bckup/. umount both drives then copy mbr dd if=/dev/hdx of=/dev/hdx bs=512 count=1 I recalled this from memory but I don''t think I left anything out, but your mileage may very, at this point you could replace your orginal with your backup and it should boot just fine. I use this method to copy/resize new virtual images and works quite good and fast. On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 2:27 PM, Matt <lm7812 at gmail.com> 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. > > Matt > _______________________________________________ > CentOS mailing list > CentOS at centos.org > http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/attachments/20080801/30c5cf00/attachment-0005.html>