[olug] [OT] Drive copy utilities?

[Rob Townley]

On Nov 7, 2007 6:51 PM, Rob Townley <rob.townley at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 11/7/07, Kevin Hinze <kevinhinze at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Howdy folks,
> >
> > I am looking for a standalone disk copy utility for imaging one hard
> > drive
> > to
> > another. For this particular application, I am using PATA drives. The
> > source
> >
> > drive will be ~250 GB while the dest drive will be ~400 GB.
> >
> > I want something OS independent, so something that is a standalone
> > bootable
> > CD
> > is highly preferred. Shareware and freeware is great but I am also
> > looking
> > at
> > commercial software, something akin to Ghost. As an aside, Ghost might
> > be
> > too
> > confusing for some end-users to easily follow instructions, but maybe
> > not.
> >
> > While a roll-it-yourself Linux solution comes to mind for many folks,
> > I'm
> > not
> > looking at this as a primary option, unless I've missed some great Linux
> > project out there to do just this.
> >
> > Anyone have any ideas?
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > ~Kevin Hinze
> > _______________________________________________
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> > OLUG at olug.org
> > http://lists.olug.org/mailman/listinfo/olug
> >
>
>
> I believe all the following bootable CDs SysRescCD.org, RipLinux, knoppix
> among others include these utilitites.
> // find the device names of your harddrives and harddrive partitions
> fdisk -lu
>
> //Use disk duplicator to copy 4k bytes at a time
> // For more on dd, google the following
> dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=4096
>
> // if the drive is failing, dd_rescue will not error out on a bad read and
> goes back to previously unreadable blocks to try to read them again.  It can
> also read in reverse.  i am not sure ghost goes nearly as far in recovering
> bad data.
>

i have used ddrescue about 18x in the last month so i don't know how i
recommended dd_rescue  ---- yes, the "dd with the _underscore_ rescue" is a
different but similar program to ddrescue.  Basic functionality is the same,
but i hope i didn't mess someone up regardless.


>
>
> If dd is too diffcult (the experimental user may overwrite the wrong
> drive) for the end user, g4u  (ghost for unix) had a gui.  That FOG link
> looks good.  FOG or SysRescCD over PXE looks to be convenient.  Should know
> in a hour or so.
>