I was reading AwesomeMachine's article here http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...icle&artid=581 and had a couple questions about dd and if I could copy an entire hard disk onto another to create an exact image, partitions, MBR and all on the other disk.

I have 2 80GB SATA disks. One has a Windows XP install and Mandriva 2006 install on it. How can I get an exact copy of that disk onto the other? will dd be able to do it? I want to be able to swap these drives interchangeably. and they must still be bootable once the copy is done.

Maybe there's some other OSS tool that will accomplish what I'm trying to do?

Any ideas?

dd should do it.

dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb

And yes there are tools which will do it also, partimage for one.

excellent, if dd can do it, that sounds great. I trust that little command more than I probably should

Would disk geometry be a problem using dd?
Or do the controllers make them all look the same now?

CollieJim