Duplicating a Fedora PC

Eric Diamond eric at ediamond.net
Mon Apr 19 03:30:30 UTC 2004


Sunday, April 18, 2004 8:24 PM Ow Mun Heng Ow Mun Heng asked:

> > On Thursday 15 April 2004 17:57, Don Levey wrote:
> > 
> > > > More experienced heads may have a better way, but I would
> > be using dd.
> 
> What if the source hard-drive is smaller than the newer one? 
> Can it still image everything and leave the free space as free??
> 
> eg : 30Gb->80Gb?

Then, Sunday, April 18, 2004 8:37 PM D at 7@k|N& replied:

> Just a guess here, but I would think that it might mess up 
> the partitioning on the larger drive.  I.e., you would have a 
> 30GB space that matched the drive you copied, with an 
> additional unpartitioned 50GB left over.

Exactly so. dd makes a block for block, (or in the case of a disk,
sector for sector) copy of the input file. Hence the need for something
like ghost. 

Which BTW, originally started out as a sector copy tool but evolved into
a utility that understands the filesystems it's copying and now actually
makes a map of the disk and then compresses the data in a propriatory
format. However, that ability allows it to move data between partitions
of different sizes. It can even shrink them (as long as the destination
is large enough to hold the data.)

Eric Diamond
eDiamond Networking & Security
303-246-9555
eric at ediamond.net
 





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