F9: Using dd to clone a drive...

[Dan Thurman]

Les Mikesell wrote:
>
> Daniel B. Thurman wrote:
>
> > > I used dd off the Gnome Live CD, so that neither
> >> > drives were mounted nor active. Next I proceeded
> >> > to use dd as follows:
> >> >
> >> > dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb
> >> >
> >> > It took approx. 6 hours to copy over 450GB of data.
> >> >
> >> You would be better off using gparted or clonzilla to do the
> >> copping. With DD, it has to copy every byte. The others understand
> >> file systems and only copy data, not empty space.
> >>
> > I tried Gparted-Live.
> >
> > Unfortunately, it failed to copy 85% of the way complaining
> > about a bad block on the source drive!  I have run the 'Check'
> > and it does not even see any problems with the source drive!
> > I even did a check on the destination drive and it says it does
> > not see any problems either - even when the copy failed!
> >
> > Is there any tool besides fsck that really does a through job
> > making sure to detect bad-blocks (if there really was any)
> > and add it to the bad block list?  Or, perhaps there is a problem
> > with Gparted-Live v0.3.7.7.1 version?
>
> A brute-force approach is 'cat /dev/sda >/dev/null'.  If it completes,
> run dmesg to see if there were any messages about soft errors or
> retries.  Also, smartctl -a /dev/sda might have something interesting
> about the disk health.
>
> I'd try to get a tar archive of the contents of that filesystem if there
> is anything important on it. The bad spot might be on an unused portion
> that a file based copy would miss.
>
>
> > The sda6 partition size is correctly 604106921 (~300GB) so why
> > the heck is Gparted reading 937752324, probably somewhere
> > in the 7th partition (5GB swap) or even possibly at the end of
> > the750GB  drive itself?
> >
> > Of the 300GB / partition, only 49GB is actually used while the
> > rest is actually empty space.  Is that the problem?  Is Gparted
> > smart enough not to copy over empty space and end after 49GB
> > of data?
> >
> > I  have tried everything I could throw at it:
> >
> > Gnome-Live & Gparted Live:
> > 1) mount /dev/sda6 /mnt/a
> >     mount /dev/sdb6 /mnt/b
> >     setenforce 0
> >    a)  cp -acpx /mnt/a/.  /mnt/b
> >    b)  tar --xattrs  -cpf - /mnt/a | (cd /mnt/b tar --xattrs -xpf - .)
> >
> > Nothing seems to work!
> >
> > Why am I not able to get the / partition copied over
> > successfully?  Everything is bootable *except* / !
>
> Do you still have both drives in the same machine, and do they contain
> LVM volumes?  If you cloned the id's the duplicate might not work. The
> solution might be as simple as unhooking the other drive. If the reason
> you are cloning is to build a different machine and you also have enough
> space on a networked drive to hold a compressed image copy, I recommend
> using clonezilla-live.  It's a bootable iso that will save the master
> copy to a local or remote (nfs/smb/ssh) drive.  Then you can boot it in
> the target and it will reconstruct the partitioning and filesystems as
> well as the contents.  It knows enough about most filesystems (including
> windows) to only copy the used portions of the disk so it is very fast.
>
Thanks to all who have replied with the suggestions.  The ONLY product
that worked for me was CloneZilla!  It *perfectly* cloned my drive and
I have an *exact* copy.  All of the other clone CDs will be snapped in half!
And not only that, CloneZilla was DAMN FAST compared with any other
program that I have tried.  GREAT (FREE) PRODUCT!

Dan