From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Jun 7 1: 2: 3 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from ngo.org.uk (ngo.org.uk [193.62.43.28]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6D3FC37B7DF for ; Wed, 7 Jun 2000 01:01:56 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from mac@ngo.org.uk) Received: (from mac@localhost) by ngo.org.uk (8.9.3/8.9.3) id JAA02546; Wed, 7 Jun 2000 09:01:17 +0100 (BST) From: Mac Message-Id: <200006070801.JAA02546@ngo.org.uk> Subject: Re: diskette duplication--exactly In-Reply-To: <20000607060447.9953.qmail@web702.mail.yahoo.com> from tienhuat lee at "Jun 6, 0 11:04:47 pm" To: tienhuat_lee@yahoo.com (tienhuat lee) Date: Wed, 7 Jun 2000 09:01:17 +0100 (BST) Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL38 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > > How to duplicate "exactly" a diskette, including everything -- > partition tables, bad sectors, file system, file, time stamp, ... BIT > BY BIT? > Hmmm. Diskettes (i.e. 3.5" floppies) don't have (generally speaking) partition tables. On the other hand, any large disk (particularly SCSI disks) will more than likely have the odd bad sector already (i.e. before you copy stuff onto it) which would probably mean that there will be some data in some sector on the source disk that wants to be copied onto some sector on the target disk that is already marked bad. I suppose you might strike lucky and find a brand new hard disk with no bad sectors on it at all that's exactly the same size as the one you want to copy, but I doubt it. And anyway, by definition a bad sector probably can't be copied in the first place, so the copy disk can't be made identical to the source disk where bad sectors are concerned. That said you probably don't need to copy bad sectors anyway, and 'dd' is the tool you want. Just make sure you use the raw disk device (e.g. /dev/rwd0c) Best of luck, Mac To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message