Date: Fri, 30 Apr 1999 11:25:42 -0700 From: Greg Shenaut <greg@bogslab.ucdavis.edu> To: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Moving OS to a new disk Message-ID: <199904301825.LAA04796@deal1.bogs.org> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 30 Apr 1999 10:54:27 CDT." <199904301548.KAA29338@cdale3.midwest.net>
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If you have two drives with identical geometry, then you can just use dd(1) to copy the exact source drive to the exact destination drive. You should use the device nodes that mean "the whole raw device, including all fdisk and bsd partitions". I do this with a tape drive intermediate step to clone systems in our lab, which all include a DOS partition as well as the BSD stuff. You shouldn't have to change boot blocks or labels or partition tables or anything else--the new disk will be an exact clone of the original. In my case, since the clones are ending up in different machines, I have a short list of changes to make in /etc/rc.conf and a few fixes of bugs that revealed themselves after I made the master tape, but you shouldn't even have to do that, if you are just replacing a flaky drive in the same system. I would suggest doing this in single user mode and just after a "sync", to cut down on the problems that fsck will find when you boot the new disk: to fsck, it will seem as if you just turned off the machine at the point the copy was made. As for making backups, you *always* should make backups, but there is no great risk in this procedure, because you aren't altering the source disk. -Greg Shenaut To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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