Hi there,

what is the best way to copy every thing from one drive to another. I have 2 drives a 300GB drive and an 80GB drive. My os is installed on the 300GB drive but only 17 GB is been used so the drive could be put to better use. I want to copy all info without any change (ie permission change) plus the boot sector.

I have done this several years ago but cant remember how also that was onto a larger drive rather than a smaller drive, so i dont know if it is all the same.

My OS is SLES 9, and their is currently no data on the 80GB drive. also will i have to change any files ie fstab bearing in mind i will swap the sata cables over so that the 80GB drive will become sda1 instead of the 300GB drive

thanks in advance

berrance

You can use the dd command to do what you want, but you'll need to use a partition editor to "correct" the partitioning you'll end up with on the smaller drive, since the partition information from the 300GB drive will have been copied to the smaller drive. The last time I did a dd drive copy, the only partition editor that could "fix" the partition table was gparted. (All of qtparted, kparted, and parted itself, "barfed" at the bad partition table but would only "fix" it by creating a new table which, of course, logically deleted the drive contents. Note, however, that it has been at least two years since I did a dd drive clone, so the other tools may now work.) The drive I was cloning contained a Fedora 8 installation and a XP installation in four partitions (ext3, lvm, ntfs, ntfs recovery), and -- after the "fix" -- both Fedora, XP and the MiniNT all worked as expected.)

See man dd for information on using the dd command, or, if you want more information, look in the "how to" LQ sub-forum.

if i create a new partition on the 80GB drive and rsync the 300GB drive to the 80GB drive would this work? forgetting the boot sector of course. no permission changes or any thing?

as for the boot sector i will install it on a floppy until the drives are swapped then re-install it into the boot sector of the 80GB drive.

would this work? its just i am wary of file permissions changing or any thing like that.

also what would the best rsync command to use be?

Well, yes, you can do it that way but some of the things in /dev don't copy as you might expect. (For example, copying /dev/null or /dev/random to a new partition could fill the new partition with undesirable things. And not having those devices in the new system could make it less functional than you might desire.)

So, if you want to clone the stuff from the large drive to the smaller one, I'd still suggest using dd. If you skip the boot sector and partition table, you should have no problems, and you can always run grub-install after you boot from the 80GB drive to get the boor sector set up properly. Look, for example, at this thread where all this is described in great detail with the precise command format illustrated.

another question, whether i use dd or rsync do i have to unmount any file systems so it doesnt copy 2TB of data out of /mnt/raid5 or doesnt it copy mounted filesystems?

I would do it this way to avoid problems:

1. Boot off a live cd, this eliminates the problem handling stuff in /{dev,sys,proc}, and also avoids corruption/locking problems due to the files being used (or even changed) concurrently while you copy them.
2. Use cp -a, tar -p, rsync or whatever you preffer to copy the files. Make sure you use the relevant parameter to preserve the permissions and ownerships.

For the boot sector you have two options. I would personally just run grub-install to reinstall it into the new hard disk, and forget about tinkering with odd stuff. The second option, if you really like risk, is to use dd, use bs=512 count=1 to save the boot record only (the first 512 bytes of the disk), then dump that on the other disk using dd again.

ok i just tried to run

dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sdb1 bs=4096 conv=notrunc,noerror

get the error message

dd: invalid conversion: notrunk

got the command and info from

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ommand-362506/

under the section linux DD

boot sector i arnt bothered about that i have done before, and if it doesnt copy properly i can try again until it works.

ignore me im an idiot i used a K instead of a C, i put notrunk instead of notrunc.

good old idiocy strikes again. he he he

coping now

let you how it goes

ok copy finished but when i try to mount the file system this happens

/ # mount /dev/sdb1 /data1 -t reiserfs
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb1,
or too many mounted file systems

is this the partition table thats broken?

i have ran

fsck.reiserfs /dev/sdb1 --rebuild-sb

than

fsck.reiserfs /dev/sdb1 --rebuild-tree

than the file system could be mounted

now for the real test when i swap the drives over

Plus i am going to try installing the boot loader and MBR using yast but on sdb so hopefully the OS will load when I swap the drives. will let you know what happens when i try it

thanks for the help so far

berrance

Better use bs=446, else you duplicate also the partition table which may not be the same on the new drive
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record

at the minuet i swapped the drives, inserted the original lses9 install disk, select install and then select boot installed system where i get the error message invalid root partition.

this may be due to what keefaz posted above. i will re try coping the fs again using the above command

again thanks for the help guys

dd is not the tool for this. See post #6 for my preferred method also - for copying the data, not the MBR.
Always reinstall the bootloader - you can also do it from the liveCD.

You're making your life harder imho
I would just boot from a live CD (like the gparted live CD) partition the new drive the way I want, mount the new partition (say in /mnt/hd2), mount the original root partition (say in /mnt/h1)
cp -a /mnt/h1/* /mnt/h2, edit /mnt/h2/etc/fstab and set bootloader to boot in new partition from new drive

I agree with those who argue that dd is not the tool to be using for backups. You should backup and restore by file, not by hard drive. For things like the MBR and the partition table which are not files you are best off to restore using the utilities which create the MBR and the partition table.

If you use a direct copy method then you can run into a lot of flaky errors. One major problem is that updates to the original files while you are doing the dd can cause the backup files and/or filesystem tree to be corrupt to the point of not being usable.

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Steve Stites