Cloning different sized hard drives?

jaykup · 03-09-2006, 09:10 PM

I've got a root 80GB drive and I'd like to transfer everything over to a 40GB drive

dd if=/dev/80gig of=/dev/40gig won't work because the sizes are too different right?

I tried cp -a / /mnt/40gig but it gets stuck in the /proc folder on an empty file (kmsg)

What's an easy way to do this?

bigrigdriver · 03-09-2006, 09:25 PM

If the source and target partitions are diffierent in size the tar command is the best and produces a 100% copy of a partition. Assuming the source is /mnt/hda1 and the target is /mnt/hdb1, just cd to /mnt/hda1 and type

tar cf - . | (cd /mnt/hdb1; tar xf -)

That will copy one partition to another, assuming the target is large enough to hold the object partition.

This will not copy the MBR from disk 1 to the MBR of disk 2.

Somewhere is these boards, you can find instructions on how to use dd to copy the MBR from one disk to another. I can't seem to find it just now.

pixellany · 03-09-2006, 10:17 PM

copy the mbr:
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=446 count=1
copies mbr from hda to hdb

jaykup · 03-10-2006, 01:42 AM

Well I'm posting this on the 40GB drive (this is good) the mbr copy didn't end up working for me :\ i got a screen that said something like:

L 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99
99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99
99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99
99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99
99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99
99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99
99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99

and so on, I ended up booting from the Slackware DVD and mounted my root parition, chrooted into it and ran lilo again

Other than that, everything works great! Thank you very much for the help

(in case anyone has this problem, this is what i did)
Boot from a Slackware CD/DVD and get to the prompt as root

Code:

mount /dev/hdc /mnt/ # mounted my CDROM which was on hdc
mount /dev/hdd1 /root # because root is empty and hdd1 is my drive (parition 1)
chroot /root /bin/bash # makes /root my new / did this in hopes lilo wouldn't get confused
/sbin/lilo # got a /proc error and one other, but said added Slack* which is my kernel name.

rebooted only to see my red lilo boot screen and it loaded the kernel just fine

I did remove the 80GB completely and moved the 40GB into the spot where the 80 was as to make sure it was /dev/hdd just to clearify.