system cloning

[Alex Zbyslaw]

Tony Shadwick wrote:

>
> I have a system that we are running in production that there was an 
> oversight on, and it has a single hard drive installed (32GB SCSI I 
> believe), rather than a 3 drive raid5 array.  We would like to correct 
> this, but we have all sorts of up-to-date packages and config files 
> that we've tweaked that we would hate to just start over on it.
>
> There's a tool for OSX called "Carbon Copy Cloner" that would take 
> care of this for me, which is basically a series of copy commands that 
> takes the filesystem from one drive to another, preserving EVERYTHING 
> important, and then bless the boot volume.

If you want two more identical drives then use dump, not tar, but you'd 
have to have them sliced/partitioned up the same beforehand and it 
wouldn't do bootblocks.

Silly question, but won't your RAID controller do it for you?  Or is 
that expecting too much?

Or what about using Ghost?  No experience of *doing* it myself, but 
someone I work with did it very successfully just a couple days ago to 
get a copy of an unbootable <hawk, spit> Linux SCSI disk onto an IDE.  
That would make the disks identical.

--Alex