Duplicating a Fedora PC

[Andy Green]

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On Thursday 15 April 2004 17:57, Don Levey wrote:

> > More experienced heads may have a better way, but I would be using dd.

> dd may be a good solution.  The man page is not too helpful for me; is
> there a write-up toward which someone can point me?

dd is really handy to have in your toolkit.  It is basically a byterange 
version of cp.

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.

You can practise dd with a floppy or usb memory stick, for example

dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/tmp/test-image bs=512 count=2880

should copy your whole floppy to /tmp/test-image.

dd if=/tmp/test-image of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 count=2880

will put the image on a new floppy.


I imaged a cdrom a while back, and I did not give a blocksize or block count, 
since I did not know how to compute it (the cdrom was half full).  What 
happened was it copied it to a file fine and gave an IO error at the very 
end, when it couldn't get any more sectors.  The output file was complete.  
This was like

dd if=/dev/cdrom of=/tmp/myimage

So I think you will be able to get away with

dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb

to transfer the contents of /dev/hda to /dev/hdb

- -Andy

- -- 
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