DD not working

[Jim Cornette]

Karl Larsen wrote:
> Vivek J. Patankar wrote:
>> Karl Larsen wrote:
>>> mount: /dev/sdb5 already mounted or /mnt busy
>>>
>>> The last 2 lines say that /dev/sdb5 is mounted to this Old Hard Drive 
>>> somehow. I did not do this. /etc/fsack did not do this. So not sure what 
>>
>> Yes you did. See your opening mail of the thread titled 'dd and cp -a' 
>> in which you say that you mounted it to /mnt, but didn't mention how. 
>> I am assuming you made it permanent by adding it to fstab. And if you 
>> did this, dd'ing the partition would take this setting over to the new 
>> drive.
>>
>    Guys I am getting a information overload. My question is simple now. 
> If I do it right is it possible to use dd to make a copy of this F7 to 
> another Hard Drive?
> 
>    Also you NEVER mount a partition that your dd transfering too. It 
> finds it fine.
> 

Wouldn't you lose 10 GB and the disk would appear to be a 20 GB disk 
also with dd?

What about making a /boot, a /home, a / and a swap partition on the new 
drive, create a filesystem and label the new partitions, then mount the 
new / under a /mnt/newdrive directory, create a boot and home partition 
on the new / partition so you could mount the to be new home drive under 
a /mnt/newdrive/home mount point and then do the same with the soon to 
be new boot directory under /mnt/newdrive/boot

Once the new disk partitions are mounted you could use rsync to 
replicate your present installation onto the new drive.

I did this once and was fairly successful and got the replicated disk to 
start to boot by using the rescue mode to run grub-install on the new 
disk. It was a sata drive and the other drive was an IDE so I had other 
issues with the attempt. If the target disk was IDE instead of a SATA 
drive, it might have worked.

Someone more familiar with rsync and the effects of /proc, /sys and 
other not truly directories might be able to answer to whether rsync 
would work when transferred to IDE to IDE. I figure the kernel panic 
that I got was because of the IDE to SATA attempt.

Using some replication program for Linux would probably be the best 
option rather than DD or rsync.

Jim

-- 
A right is not what someone gives you; it's what no one can take from you.
		-- Ramsey Clark