cloning bootable hard drive

[Derek Atkins]

Jarod Wilson <jarod at wilsonet.com> writes:

>> How are you copying the drive?  I would do:
>> 
>>  dd if=/dev/<olddrive> of=/dev/<newdrive> bs=1m
>
> Assuming <newdrive> is at least as big as <olddrive>, that should work
> too. Some potential fixups needed to make proper use of additional space
> on a larger drive though. I went from a 120G drive to a 250G drive in my
> laptop, and wanted to expand each of my partitions, so my previously
> mentioned rsync method worked much better for me.

True, the dd assumes the new drive is >= the old drive,
which is usually the case nowadays.  Yes, you need to do
some special work to make more use of the space.  However
if you wanted to redo ALL the paritions then you will lose
your bootability because the MBR wont point to the right
place to find the boot loader.  So you'd need to re-install
grub.

> Looking at clonezilla is still on my 'things to do some day' list, but I
> rarely cross anything off that list lately...

I hear ya!

-derek
-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available

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