[GRLUG] duplicate usb drive

[Bill Littlejohn]

I'm a little confused.
"You can correct the partition table with parted or fstab after it's done.".
What do you mean by "correct"?
I've used guiparted in Knoppix but not much else. I usually use 
Partition Commander.
I'm also a little confused on the purpose of using fdisk and ntfsresize 
after transferring the image.
"
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=4000000
fdisk /dev/sdb
...
ntfsresize /dev/sdb1
"
I know I'm being somewhat dense here - a little hand-holding would be 
appreciated.
:)
Bill


Al Tobey wrote:
> On 8/30/06, Bill Littlejohn <billl at mtd-inc.com> wrote:
>   
>> OK. Short background.
>> The integrated video card in my wifes winxp box is borked and the system
>> won't boot anything.
>> I want to duplicate the drive in order to boot the copy using LiveView
>> in a VM for the purpose of recovering
>> the damned DRM license keys for all her music.
>>
>> I have the 40GB source drive hooked up a usb-ide converter.
>> I have a handy 75GB usb drive available to put the copy onto.
>> My source drive shows as /dev/sda and the target as /dev/sdb under both
>> Suse and Knoppix.
>> No surprises there.
>> The source drive has a single NTFS partition using 100%.
>>
>> So here is the problem,
>> I need the result to be an exact copy (i.e. bootable), OR a single dd
>> image would work for LiveView also, but needs to be readable from Win.
>> I can't seem to use "dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb " because the drives are
>> of differing geometry. (I tried anyway but got something like 116Kb/sec
>> transfer and gave up :(
>>     
>
> Try: dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=4000000
>
> If your USB adapter is 1.0, it's not going to get faster.   I get much
> better speeds than that on my USB2 adapter, though.     Using the
> larger block size makes a big difference.
>
>   
>> I can't use "dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/mnt/sdb1/winxp.img" because I need to
>> format the target drive as FAT32 to be readable under Win and Linux and
>> obviously you can't have a 37GB file on FAT32.
>>     
>
> Just dd it over directly.    You can correct the partition table with
> parted or fstab after it's done.   I just did this the other day from
> a Linux rescue CD.
>
> dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=4000000
> fdisk /dev/sdb
> ...
> ntfsresize /dev/sdb1
>
> With a little google searching, you can find how to merge the boot
> sector from the source drive onto the destination drive.    Once you
> have that knowledge, you can just dd the partition after creating one
> of the same or slightly larger size on the dest drive.
>
> dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sdb1 bs=4000000
>
> To view your speed while dd is running, switch consoles and hit it with:
> kill -USR1 `ps -ef |awk '/dd if/{print $2}'`
> (kill -USR1 the pid of dd)
>
> -Al Tobey
>
>   
>> So how does one make an exact copy of a drive to a non-identical drive?
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> grlug mailing list
>> grlug at grlug.org
>> http://shinobu.grlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/grlug
>>
>>     
>
>
>   

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://shinobu.grlug.org/pipermail/grlug/attachments/20060830/58bfee7e/attachment.htm