cloning hard disk for recovery

[Les Mikesell]

On Thu, 2006-11-16 at 16:49 -0700, Paul Lemmons wrote:
> My hard disk is squealing like a rodent on fire. I think I am an 
> trouble. I believe I can read the whole drive so I can get the data from 
> it. I have seen a number of references to using dd to clone a disk. That 
> is what I am hoping to do. Here are the steps I am planning to do, 
> please redirect me as needed because I have not had to do this before.
> 
> 1) Install new hard disk along side the current hard disk
> 2) dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb conv=noerror,sync
> 3) remove bad hard disk
> 4) re-cable the new hard disk using old hard disk connection
> 5) pray
> 6) reboot

You shouldn't have any problem as long as you can still read
the old disk and the new one is the same size.  Just don't
try to boot with both drives still in place after the copy
because you will have duplicate disk labels.  Those used
to confuse the kernel when booting, but perhaps it has been
fixed by now.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   lesmikesell at gmail.com