dd question, what am I doing wrong?

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Fri, 2009-12-04 at 14:07 -0800, Daniel B. Thurman wrote:
> >> What am I doing wrong here and how do I get around this?
> >>     
> > You have to resize Disk2 to 250Gb with resize2fs or parted.
> >   
> Ok, I used gparted to shrink the size of the partition and grow the
> partition again.  That did the trick.
> 
> I wonder if it would have been easier to just:
> 
> resize2fs /dev/sdb1

The whole approach is wrong IMHO. Unless the two partitions are the same
size there's no particular point in using dd for this. Much better to
create (mkfs) a new filesystem on the new partition, then use tar, or
rsync, or even "cp -r" to copy the contents. I doubt it's slower than dd
+resize, doesn't copy anything except file blocks that are actually in
use, and has the potential advantage of leaving you with a better layout
at the end. You can also take advantage of the copy to change filesystem
types, e.g. from ext3 to ext4.

poc