From owner-freebsd-questions Fri Mar 10 12:21:22 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from fedde.littleton.co.us (fedde.littleton.co.us [216.17.174.44]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6BCB237BA32 for ; Fri, 10 Mar 2000 12:21:13 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from cfedde@fedde.littleton.co.us) Received: from fedde.littleton.co.us (localhost.fedde.littleton.co.us [127.0.0.1]) by fedde.littleton.co.us (8.10.0.Beta12/8.10.0.Beta10) with ESMTP id e2AKKnm75550; Fri, 10 Mar 2000 13:20:49 -0700 (MST) Message-Id: <200003102020.e2AKKnm75550@fedde.littleton.co.us> To: "'Peter Radcliffe'" Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG From: Chris Fedde Subject: Re: disk cloning (& a bit of picobsd) In-reply-to: Your message of "Fri, 10 Mar 2000 12:51:12 EST." <20000310125112.F2584@pir.net> Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2000 13:20:49 -0700 Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG "'Peter Radcliffe'" writes: +--------------- | Ken Bolingbroke probably said: | > Is there a particular reason you say dd is evil for disk cloning? I admin | | It can screw up partitioning, can waste space on the disk and can | generally mess up in weird ways and cause problems later for an unwary | admin. The questioner seemed somewhat unwary. +--------------- Hence the phrase "for similar drive geometries" when I recommend using dd to clone drives. Without that you can get into all kinds of interesting problems, as you point out. Still for many large installations with large numbers of identical systems the dd technique is faster and more reliable than some of the more complex techniques that attempt to read and write partition maps, newfs and then use dump/restore to copy contents. YMMV chris __ Chris Fedde 303 773 9134 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message