Date: Thu, 01 Sep 2016 17:48:34 -0500 From: Brandon J. Wandersee <brandon.wandersee@gmail.com> To: Mike Clarke <jmc-freebsd2@milibyte.co.uk> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org, "Christoph P.U. Kukulies" <kuku@kukulies.org>, "Kevin P. Neal" <kpn@neutralgood.org> Subject: Re: dd blocksize when copying to SSD disk Message-ID: <8637lj2q4d.fsf@WorkBox.Home> In-Reply-To: <2338862.z0bWHT8yXQ@curlew.lan> References: <b2926488-b93b-9586-898e-1ec697529a97@kukulies.org> <20160831184925.GA80454@neutralgood.org> <2338862.z0bWHT8yXQ@curlew.lan>
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Mike Clarke writes: > On Wednesday 31 Aug 2016 14:49:25 Kevin P. Neal wrote: >> On Wed, Aug 31, 2016 at 06:35:28PM +0200, Christoph P.U. Kukulies wrote: >> > I'm about to copy an existing Windows 7 system to an SSD. Source drive >> > is a hard disk of 256 GB, destination drive a 500 GB Samsung SSD 850 EVO. >> > >> > >> > >> > Given the fact that unnecessary write operations to SSDs should be >> > avoided I'm thinking about the best strategy to use dd to write to the >> > SSD. >> >> I'm not sure that dd is the best strategy. Using Windows to do the copy >> may be better. > > But the Windows copy command isn't very good at copying the entire system, it > will fail to copy open files and certain "special" system files. On the other > hand dd will copy everything in the partition but at the expense of wasting > space by copying all the unused blocks. > > An alternative would be to use Driveimage XML > <www.runtime.org/driveimage-xml.htm> from within Windows to create a > compressed backup of all used blocks in the system. It's also available on a > Knopixx live CD <www.runtime.org/data-recovery-live-cd> which, I think, runs > it under wine so it could probably be run under wine on FreeBSD to create or > restore a backup of an entire Windows partition. For what it's worth, I've used EaseUs Todo Backup to completely clone a Windows install from one disk to another. It's not a spectacular program, but it's free to use and did the trick. -- :: Brandon J. Wandersee :: brandon.wandersee@gmail.com :: -------------------------------------------------- :: 'The best design is as little design as possible.' :: --- Dieter Rams ----------------------------------
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