[GRLUG] duplicate usb drive

[Al Tobey]

On 8/30/06, Bill Littlejohn <billl at mtd-inc.com> wrote:
>
>  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?

Yup.

>  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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