I have been reading alot today about using dd and netcat to copy the contents of a disk to another machine. Also about using / creating a LiveCD to boot into to perform the copy. Well I have a few questions that I hope someone can assist me with.

1) When I look in dmesg it shows that I have 10 partitions on /dev/sda. Now this is a 6 disk RAID 5 Array.
As long as I have a big enough target disk will I be able to just say dd if=/dev/sda | nc somehost 9000 ? Also in this assumption is that the Linux Live CD I boot into has a perc driver to see the array.

2) I was hoping to use and customize SLAX for my LiveCD. The RAID controller is a perc (Dell PowerEdge Raid Controller). This device I believe was installed using a Dell installation utility that wraps the installation of an OS. Anyone know if a driver for this controller exists for Slackware 2.6 ? Or is it covered by the aic7xxx / megaraid drivers that you can select during the kernel rebuild? (I know this question might belong in hardware)


thanks in advance

Doug

LQ has the definitive thread on how to learn the dd command.

I too went to the trouble of creating my own boot disc with specialized drive imaging tools on it. Then I discovered Helix - everything you need, no waiting.