Re: F9: Using dd to clone a drive...

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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.

--
  Les Mikesell
   lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx

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