Date: Fri, 28 Sep 2001 10:53:34 -0500 From: Andy Sparrow <spadger@best.com> To: kjerste soderberg <kjerstes@yahoo.com> Cc: Marc Rassbach <marc@milestonerdl.com>, freebsd-mobile@FreeBSD.ORG, andy@CRWdog.demon.co.uk Subject: Re: cloning laptop drives Message-ID: <20010928155334.8B57E3E2A@CRWdog.demon.co.uk> In-Reply-To: Message from kjerste soderberg <kjerstes@yahoo.com> of "Thu, 27 Sep 2001 20:00:09 PDT." <20010928030009.22753.qmail@web9703.mail.yahoo.com>
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You can happily clone off a disk with mounted filesystems, and write to another drive. However, note that this isn't ideal - you'll at least need to fsck the target filesystem afterward (e.g. on booting from it), and you might just be unlucky (e.g. something might be hosed). Far better to have it unmounted when you clone from the source - then you should get a good copy. As others have noted, you need to use a vastly larger block size for better performance. I was getting good results with bs=1024k (e.g. 1Mb) for cloning 18Gb SCSI root drives. Admittedly completely different hardware, YMMV. The default block size would have taken forever, BTW. Maybe the best scenario would be to remove both drives, place them in another machine (e.g. a desktop with a couple of 2.5"->3.5" adaptors), boot from yet another controller channel/drive and do the transfer that way. Lot of messing about - but possibly worth it if you don't trust the laptop hardware for some reason? Most laptops that support more than one disk already put them as masters on different controllers (least, the ones I've seen do), so why don't you boot from the FreeBSD CD/install floppies, and do the cloning from Rescue mode? You wouldn't need to remove/mess about with the hardware, all the filesystems on your source drive are completely unmounted and thus quiescent. This is the way I'd probably go. I would also note that I've had 2.5" drives that seem to run fine (and so does the OS on them), yet they won't clone satisfactorily. However, these were older drives (300mb!!) and were probably genuinely suspect - modern stuff should behave rather better, I expect. If your stuff is older, try listening to make sure that the drive isn't recalibrating if it is taking too long, and check for driver/disk timeout or error messages. Good luck! Cheers, AS > SO you mean move to yet another machine and say boot > off of say scsi da1 ? then do as root; > dd if=/dev/ad1 of=/dev/ad2 bs=1m > > would work? the bs I'm assuming is 1 meg size block > taken from previous answer to my post? > > Again I thank ALL respondents ... To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-mobile" in the body of the message
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