[Novalug] OT: Disk cloning - new hard drive in workstation [IBM/Fujitsu]

[Jay Hart]

I think this topic would be great for a NovaLUG demo doing the meeting. 
Couple of dummy drives with iso files, for using to dd stuff between drives
and PCs.

Jay

> The last time I used dd for cloning was about 4 years ago, when I was moving
> YellowDogLinux
> installations between partitions on a G5 XServe, and I think I was using a
> blocksize of 1M.  The
> partitions were the same size.
> I was doing some googling a few weeks ago and did see some references to using
> dd as a
> cloning tool, and how to handle cases where the drive being cloned was
> damaged, or where
> an incomplete buffer was read.
>
> Rob
>
>  -------------- Original message ----------------------
> From: Jon LaBadie <novalugml at jgcomp.com>
>> On Tue, Sep 09, 2008 at 12:34:58PM -0400, Nick Danger wrote:
>> > Ken Kauffman wrote:
>> > > I use dd.  If you want to clone over the network from one machine to
>> > > another, use dd piped to netcat on the push side and netcat piped to
>> > > dd on the pull side.
>> >
>> > I used DD once, and it took an insanely long amount of time to move a
>> > partition over. I chalked it up to dd and never used it since, but maybe
>> > I was doing something wrong if people are using it regularly to move
>> > partitions around?
>> >
>>
>> Typically dd defaults to copying 512 byte size "blocks" at a time.
>> Nice that it matches the common sector size of a disk, but so slow
>> for large transfers.
>>
>> Things often speed up nicely by using a larger blocksize, say 8k.
>>
>> I've not used it for disk cloning.  What blocksize do those that
>> do use dd for disk cloning recommend?
>>
>>
>> --
>> Jon H. LaBadie                  jon at jgcomp.com
>>  JG Computing
>>  12027 Creekbend Drive		(703) 787-0884
>>  Reston, VA  20194		(703) 787-0922 (fax)
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