Hey guys,

I've been successfully ghosting hard drives using:
I use dd because i want all of the partition info to copy, the MBR, and so forth... this would not be possible with a cp method

However i've run into the problem of wanting to ghost an 80gb hard drive to a 30gb hard drive. The caviat is that the 80gb drive only has 15gb in use. The problem I see here is that the data could be out past 15GB worth of sectors... therefore a dd of 15gb might not catch all the data. The only way i could think of this being done is to re-arrange the data on the disk, which I have no clue how to do or if it is possible.

therefore I was wondering if anyone knows of a way of doing this? Not necessarily re-arranging the data, just solving the problem in general

Thanks!
George

Um.... messy. You could use qtparted on the 80GB HD to resize the partition to, say 20GB for example, then use dd. Your only problem, as far as I as can see, is that dd if=/dev/sda ... will 'ghost' the entire HD regardless of partition size, hence you would still end up trying to fit 80GB on a 15GB HD. You might need to use dd if=/dev/sda1 to ghost the first partition (on the 80GB HD after resizing it with qtparted) instead and then possible install a bootloader into the MBR of the 15GB HD seperately using a liveCD or something. You'd probably have to make sure you've copied the partition table from the 80GB HD first though.

I'm not entirely sure myself how you'd do this but I don't think you're going to be able to simply 'ghost' the 80GB HD on to 30GB without some serious messing about.

LVM can change the size of its volumes. AFAIR there is a command from LVM to take a snapshot of a file system, but that would work only if you have your 80 GB disk on LVM. Maybe a scheme for the future?