From owner-freebsd-isp Wed Nov 29 7:38:42 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-isp@freebsd.org Received: from bsdie.rwsystems.net (bsdie.rwsystems.net [209.197.223.2]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 13A9437B401 for ; Wed, 29 Nov 2000 07:38:40 -0800 (PST) Received: from bsdie.rwsystems.net([209.197.223.2]) (2204 bytes) by bsdie.rwsystems.net via sendmail with P:esmtp/R:bind_hosts/T:inet_zone_bind_smtp (sender: ) id for ; Wed, 29 Nov 2000 09:37:59 -0600 (CST) (Smail-3.2.0.111 2000-Feb-17 #1 built 2000-Jun-25) Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2000 09:37:59 -0600 (CST) From: James Wyatt To: Massimo Fubini Cc: danny@i-p-d.nl, freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Drive Copy In-Reply-To: <767440343.20001129142712@aexis-telecom.it> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org On Wed, 29 Nov 2000, Massimo Fubini wrote: > Use dd. For more information man dd. > For example if you want to copy a single partition you do: > dd if=/dev/origin_partiton of=/dev/destination_part > > It is easy and powerful. And incomplete. I know you can connect the drive, boot, and use the /stand/sysinstall utility to carve the drive up into partitions for filesystems and swap areas. If you want, it can newfs partitions so you can mount the new partitions and user tar/cpio to transfer files. What do you do to init the swap and set the boot sector/MBR stuff? While this stuff is fairly "simple" in that it requires just a few steps, it is pretty arcane to many folks, especially new unix admins. The risk of toasting your "real" drive is very nonzero as well. Since new drives are almost always larger, just dd-ing things is wasteful. Using dd requires that you understand the various disk devices fairly well too. This stuff is easy for many folks on this list, but not so obvious to the original poster. I'm sure we can get together and help him (and other lurkers) more than a "RTFM for dd, and it's easy". I've included a few of the other steps (sysinstall) above, but don't have all the answers. Can someone point to more information or reply to the list with more detailed steps and techniques? I've usually had to install FreeBSD (usually a newer version) onto the new drive, hand-build the devs (MAKEDEV or *careful* use of sysinstall), redo local changes and rebuild ports, and tar/cpio-transfer data files. - Jy@ btw: Even dd is usually somewhat faster with a 'bs=100k' or so. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-isp" in the body of the message