system cloning

[Alex Zbyslaw]

Philip Hallstrom 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.
>
>
> You would?  Why?  restore doesn't care where you're restoring to... 
> you'd just need to make sure you were in / before restoring and then 
> tweak /etc/fstab to suit...

I understood the question to be how to create two identical *disks* not 
two identical directory trees.  So unless the disks were partitioned and 
sliced the same before you used dump/restore then you wouldn't end up 
with identical disks.  If all you want is two identical directory trees, 
then slicing and partitioning are irrelevant.

--Alex