best approach to clone a disk?

[fbsd_user]

Cloning a complete HD mbr and all to second HD
in same FreeBSD box is a snap using ghost.

That's the way I make additional FreeBSD workstation pc'a.

I take the HD from the target and plug it into the FreeBSD box, then
boot ghost from floppy, do ghost hd to hd copy, remove cloned HD and
put it into target box and boot it up and it runs just like the
original.

This is not the Freebsd way.
But its quick and can also be used for my window boxs on my LAN.
You get double the bang for your buck.

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org]On Behalf Of Joe Auty
Sent: Tuesday, February 14, 2006 12:26 PM
To: Alec Berryman
Cc: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
Subject: Re: best approach to clone a disk?



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.


Hmmm... Could you tell me more about how the fixit images work? I've
never had to do that... basically, I just need something that will
allow me to boot up into single user mode. I've been using the
source
disk in single user mode, and doing a mount -u /  to make sure that
it is mounted read only. Before I go this route, I'm thinking it
might be wise to give "dump" another try from a working boot CD.
What
is the best way to create myself a boot CD that I can use to boot up
in single user mode?

As far as your tar idea, the idea seems great, although I'm not sure
whether I have enough space to store both the tarball and the space
needed to extract the tarball to. We are talking over a 100 gig
here.


Thanks for your advice!


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