From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG  Wed Apr 16 02:52:11 2003
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Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2003 11:52:08 +0200
From: Siegbert Baude <Siegbert.Baude@gmx.de>
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To: David David <ddavid_3@yahoo.com>
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Subject: Re: MBR, Partition File recover
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Hi David,

Josh explained the gpart method perfectly, this tool once did a great 
job for my friend's disk, too. :-)
To make things less complicated in cases of future disaster, just keep a 
printout of your partition table in a safe place.

> Before i do this, is there a way of making a complete copy of the
> drive first? I can store it on another drive in the system. I've been
> going through dd man page, and searching on the net, but have not yet
> found a way of doing.


dd if=/dev/ad0 of=/dev/ad1 bs=128k

To backup your first hard disk to your second hard disk. The second one 
of course must be at least as big as your first one.

Short annotation: bs=128k speeds up backup significantly for IDE disks. 
For SCSI the best value with standard settings is bs=64k IIRC. To be 
sure, search the archives, I'm sure that it was posted by Greg Lehey.

Ciao
Siegbert