best approach to clone a disk?

[Joe Auty]

On Feb 14, 2006, at 12:07 PM, Alec Berryman wrote:

> Joe Auty on 2006-02-14 11:49:05 -0500:
>
>> What is the best way to clone a disk in FreeBSD?
>
> [...]
>
>> Can I use DD on two disks of different size? Do you recommend Ghost
>> for Unix?
>
> g4u is a very nice wrapper for dd.  I've had great success with it for
> identically-sized disks; there shouldn't be a problem if the target
> disk is larger than the source disk, because you can edit the
> partitions around and then growfs.
>
> Don't overlook tar, though - it doesn't care about disk sizes as long
> as you have enough free space, doesn't care about partitions, and is
> simpler in many cases.  If you boot up to the fixit image from an
> install CD you can partition and newfs to however you like and then
> untar.



Also, I see that growfs operates off of free sectors. If I were to  
use dd/g4u, how would I know how many sectors are available for me to  
grow the partition to? The "df" command only seems to operate in  
blocksizes, not sectors. This is rather new to me...






-----------
Joe Auty
NetMusician: web publishing software for musicians
http://www.netmusician.org
joe at netmusician.org