F9: Using dd to clone a drive...

[Michael Wiktowy]

On Fri, Jul 18, 2008 at 7:48 PM, Dan Thurman <dant at cdkkt.com> wrote:
>
> Can someone give me some guidance as to post-followup to dd, or
> perhaps a repair of / partition, or to simply download Gparted-Live
> and make a partition to partition copy of / (which I am downloading
> as I write up this post)?
>
> Curiously, why is it that dd works for XP/Vista and not Fedora-9?

A few things I can think of:

dd with a bs=8M (or some blocksize bigger than the default) argument
runs *way* faster. So if you want to try dd-ing again (maybe something
got corrupted somehow the first time), it will likely finish in an
hour or so instead of 6.

You can also use dd on a partition by partition basis in the same way
... just specify the partition device name instead of the whole disk.
... which would be even faster if you want to just retry the
partition. Just make sure you are not clning the corrupted/empty
partition over the good one. It is *very* easy to do such things with
dd.

Are you leaving the old hard drive still in the machine when rebooting
after cloning ... maybe just putting it into the secondary interface.
If so, then you might be running into disk label conflicts with Fedora
struggling to figure out which partition labeled "/" to mount.

Be wary of booting your system with two cloned harddrives installed. I
have been burned by that in the past with Windows. Somehow it decided
to use a little bit of the OS from one drive and a little bit of the
OS from the other drive such that it ran when both were in the machine
but if I pulled either one out, it would not boot.

Or alternatively, if your partitions are being mounted by UUID then
some might not be getting mounted at all. That might account for the
missing x,y,z errors. Check what your fstab on the new disk says. I
think the UUID would change for the partition on the new disk but I am
not sure. 'blkid /dev/sda1' is how to get the UUID of sda1

I have used dd in the past to do the things you seem to be doing, so
unless something got broken in F9, it should work.

/Mike