backing up , hard drive transfer

iceman81 · 02-19-2013, 04:48 PM

i have CentOS running on an older pc on a sata drive. what i'd like to do is ghost the drive so that i can transfer it to an ide drive that have so i can use that sata drive for another computer. ideally i'd like to just buy another sata drive and leave well enough alone, but money is an issue and if this can be done without much trouble i'd like to give it a shot. its *basically* a fresh install, aside from having apache set up with a test web page, that i don't want to lose.

any suggestions?

Kustom42 · 02-19-2013, 05:03 PM

You could use dd to image your drive but if its just a base install why dont you just back up your apache config and test page then do a clean install and restore them? It would be much less painless and has a much smaller potential for problems.

cbtshare · 02-19-2013, 08:16 PM

This command works great, it give a duplicate of the drive.You should have another drive to backup to, dont dd to the same drive you are backing up.

dd if=/dev/hda3 of=/Some_folder/on_a_different_drive/backup_set_1.img

Kustom42 · 02-19-2013, 08:31 PM

To further iterate the previous warning...

DONT DD TO THE SAME PHYSICAL DRIVE!

You will corrupt the drive if you dd to itself, it has happened to the best of us. Don't assume that you are writing to another drive based upon it being a different filesystem. Check your mounts with

Code:

mount | column -t

Also verify that you arent using LVM as it can cause confusion on the mount output:

Code:

lvdisplay
vgdisplay
pvdisplay