cloning hard disk for recovery

[Paul Lemmons]

-------- Original Message  --------
Subject: cloning hard disk for recovery
From: Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>
To: For users of Fedora <fedora-list at redhat.com>
Date: 11/16/2006 05:16 PM

> 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.
> 

It appears that this machine is running SATA, If that changes things, 
let me know. When I try to do a:

# hdparm -i /dev/sda

I get

/dev/sda:
  HDIO_GET_IDENTITY failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device


# fdisk -l

gives me:

Disk /dev/sda: 164.6 GB, 164696555520 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 20023 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1          13      104391   83  Linux
/dev/sda2              14       20023   160730325   8e  Linux LVM

But I would really like to have the model, the size it thinks it is and 
other various details. Is it possible to do this with SATA drives?

New Plan:

1) Install new hard disk along side the current hard disk
2) dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb conv=noerror,sync
3) remove bad hard disk
4) re-cable the new hard disk using old hard disk connection
5) pray twice as hard
6) reboot
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