[wplug] Copying a harddrive

[Poyner, Brandon]

As long as you're copying to a drive larger than the drive being replaced you could do a 
 
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb
 
The thing you're missing by setting up the partition table and then copying hda1 to hdb2 is the master boot record, the first 512 bytes of the hard drive.  If you _only_ wanted the MBR you would do something like this
 
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=512 count=1
 
If you do hda to hdb you get the entire thing, MBR, partition table, partitions, and even any blank space at the end of the drive that falls outside of the partition table.  The only thing to do at that point is expand the partition to fill up the available space using fdisk and then grow the file system.  How you grow the file system depends entirely on the file system type in question.  There are linux tools for doing that for NTFS, ext2 has resize2fs, reiserfs has resize_reiserfs, etc.
 
Defining the blocksize is a good idea, it defines what chunk size dd should use for buffers.  If I understand the man page correctly if you don't define the blocksize you end up reading in 1 block at a time, write that block, rise and repeat. But technically speaking it's not required, it just speeds things up.
 
-----Original Message----- 
From: Robert E. Coutch [mailto:robert.coutch at verizon.net] 
Sent: Wed 2/25/2004 9:29 PM 
To: wplug at wplug.org 
Cc: 
Subject: [wplug] Copying a harddrive



	Maybe you have a better way to do this.
	Here's the situation.
	
	Someone wants to upgrade from a small sized hard disk to a larger one.
	They don't wan't to reinstall their entire system (usually Windows).
	
	Normally I do the following:
	
	Add the new drive to the current system and boot under Linux from CD-ROM
	(Knoppix or Disto rescue CD).
	
	Use fdisk to create a new partition on the new hard drive (we'll say its
	/dev/hdb).
	Set the partition type (Linux, NTFS, etc).
	Set the partition active and write the table.
	
	Copy the old drive partition (/dev/hda1) to the new one (/dev/hdb1):
	dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/dev/hdb1
	
	I now have a duplicate of the old drive including the size of the old drive on
	the new drive.
	
	I then run Partition Commander to expand the partiton to the full size of the
	drive.
	
	I remove the old drive and permantly install the new one.
	
	System is good to go.
	
	
	My questions are:
	Is there a better way of doing this without paying for some custom software? 
	Am I using dd correctly?
	Do I need to state block size and what happenes when I don't?
	
	
	Thanks for you help,
	
	Bob
	
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