imaging a drive to replace it

[dsr-mzpnVDyJpH4k7aNtvndDlA at public.gmane.org (Dan Ritter)]

On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 03:57:31PM -0400, Tim Callaghan wrote:
> Are there products to replace a drive in a Linux box by imaging it to a new
> hard drive?  I've used Acronis True Image plenty of times on my windows
> machines but never had the need (until now) to do it for linux.
> Thanks,

If you can plug them in at the same time, dd is your friend.

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

will get everything from disk /dev/hda and put it on /dev/hdb,
assuming hdb is the same size or larger. 

Or you might create partitions on the new disk and do it one
partition at a time:

dd if=/dev/hda3 of=/dev/hdb2

again, the destination partition must be the same size or
larger.

Or you can create partitions and filesystems and transfer
at the per-file level with "cp -r" or rsync or tar with pipes,
or...

Tell us more about your situation and we can refine this for
you.


-dsr-

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