cloning a boot partition

[Mark Knecht]

On 6/16/05, Kim johansen <lotto.kim at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/16/05, Mark Knecht <markknecht at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >    What tools do people find most simple/fast/fool-proof for cloning a
> > drive, and expecially cloning a boot partition? I've got a small
> > system with an 8GB drive but only about 2.5GB on the system. There is
> > a boot partition, swap and root. I'd like to clone this drive three
> > times to larger 80GB drives.
> 
> You can use dd, feks:
> $ dd if=/dev/hda of=image_hda.iso
> 
> and move this image to the new harddisk, importing it with:
> $ cat image_hda.iso > /dev/hda
> 
> i have never tryed it, but i think it gonna work, but, somthing you
> need to think about, the partitions will have the same size.
> 
> --
> Kim Johansen
> lotto.kim at gmail.com
> 

Kim,
   Thanks. That's an interesting idea. However where is
of=image_hda.iso getting stored? The drive I'm cloning is the only
drive in the system.

   Would it be possible to put the two commands together somehow? I've
just unpacked a little EIDE to USB adapter device that is supposed to
allow me to attach a raw EDIE drive to the system as a USB drive.
(We'll see if it works in 20 minutes!) ;-) Anyway, I expect that the
EIDE drive will be /dev/hda and the USB drive with be /dev/sda. Would
something like this work?

dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/sda

   Having the partition sizes identical is perfect for my needs. This
would leave the last 72GB unpartitioned and I could use it for video
storage on the network.

Thanks,
Mark