[GRLUG] duplicate usb drive

[Bill Littlejohn]

So you are saying that, so long as I do not care about wasted space 
(which i do not), then

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=4000000

should work just fine and will be bootable?


Michael Mol wrote:
> rsync works at the filesystem level.  He needs it to be bootable,
> which means copying at least the boot sector and the first sector of
> the NTFS partition.
>
> A straight dd works well for that.  Heck, if he's comfortable with his
> old FS size, he doesn't even need to adjust ("correct") the partition
> table and filesystem sizes to reflect the size of the target drive.
>
> On 8/30/06, Justin Denick <justin.denick at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> You could probably use rsync -avz source dest
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On 8/30/06, Bill Littlejohn <billl at mtd-inc.com> wrote:
>>     
>>>
>>>
>>> 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?
>>>
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>>>
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>>>       
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> In vino veritas.
>>         [In wine there is truth.]
>>                 -- Pliny
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