Duplicating a Fedora PC

[Jeff Vian]

Ow Mun Heng wrote:

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>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: fedora-list-bounces at redhat.com
>>[mailto:fedora-list-bounces at redhat.com]On Behalf Of Andy Green
>>Sent: Friday, April 16, 2004 5:27 AM
>>To: For users of Fedora Core releases
>>Subject: Re: Duplicating a Fedora PC
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>>-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>>Hash: SHA1
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>>On Thursday 15 April 2004 17:57, Don Levey wrote:
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>>>>More experienced heads may have a better way, but I would 
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>>be using dd.
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>>>dd may be a good solution.  The man page is not too helpful 
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>>for me; is
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>>>there a write-up toward which someone can point me?
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>>dd is really handy to have in your toolkit.  It is basically 
>>a byterange 
>>version of cp.
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>>The concept is if you have two HDDs installed, say as 
>>/dev/hda and /dev/hdb, 
>>then you can open /dev/hda and copy what you find in that 'file' over 
>>to /dev/hdb.  This makes a perfect duplicate because what is 
>>'in' /dev/hda is every sector on that hard drive.
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>What if the source hard-drive is smaller than the newer one?
>Can it still image everything and leave the free space as free??
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>eg : 30Gb->80Gb?
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Do NOT use dd to copy from drive to drive unless the drives are exactly 
identical.  "dd" used on a device level creates an /exact/ copy, so 
copying a 30gb drive to an 80gb drive will leave you with a useable 30gb 
drive.  It would copy partition table, drive geometry, etc. and make an 
exact bit for bit image.

It us usually safe to use dd to copy a partition to another *identically 
sized* partition.

I did not see the beginning of this thread, so I don't know exactly what 
you are trying to do, but it sounds to me like you need something other 
than "dd" to accomplish it.

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