How to duplicate a disk
jludwig
wralphie at comcast.net
Thu Oct 27 10:16:50 UTC 2005
On Saturday 29 October 2005 11:20, Les Mikesell wrote:
> On Sat, 2005-10-29 at 05:22, LinuxMedia wrote:
> > >The thing I was really trying to stress is that "dd" is not a good tool
> > >to use _unless_ the source and target drives are the same make and
> > > >model as "dd" does a block-by-block copy...and that includes the
> > > partition table and boot sector. If the drives don't match up, you
> > > could end up with a mess. That holds even for drives in LBA mode on
> > > some systems with weird BIOSes.
> >
> > I completly forgot about all these considerations. Would it suffice to
> > just have two drives that are the same size? Or would that even be
> > taking a chance? I remember being very careful to get the same makes of
> > drives just in case there were slight difference is Brand X's 40 Gig
> > drive and Brand Y's 40 Gig drive.
>
> An 'fdisk -l' should show the drive geometry. If the
> heads/sectors/cylinders match on the drives a dd
> clone should work find. However there are some identifiers
> on raid and LVM volumes that may cause trouble if two
> cloned drives are ever connected in the same machine
> at boot time, and I don't think the previous discussion
> mentioned the filesystem labels that are used in fstab
> and grub by default. If you clone with dd, these are
> reproduced identically and will work in another machine
> by will prevent booting when you have duplicates connected.
> If you copy with one of the other methods you either
> have to add the filesystem labels yourself or edit
> /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/grub.conf to use the
> partition device names.
>
> --
> Les Mikesell
> lesmikesell at gmail.com
As far as the label is concerned;
E2LABEL(8)
E2LABEL(8)
NAME
e2label - Change the label on an ext2/ext3 filesystem
SYNOPSIS
e2label device [ new-label ]
DESCRIPTION
e2label will display or change the filesystem label on the ext2
filesystem located on device.
If the optional argument new-label is not present, e2label will simply
display the current filesystem label.
If the optional argument new-label is present, then e2label will set
the filesystem label to be new-label. Ext2
filesystem labels can be at most 16 characters long; if new-label is
longer than 16 characters, e2label will trun-
cate it and print a warning message.
It is also possible to set the filesystem label using the -L option of
tune2fs(8).
AUTHOR
e2label was written by Theodore Ts’o (tytso at mit.edu).
AVAILABILITY
e2label is part of the e2fsprogs package and is available from
http://e2fsprogs.sourceforge.net.
SEE ALSO
mke2fs(8), tune2fs(8)
E2fsprogs version 1.38 June 2005
E2LABEL(8)
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