best approach to clone a disk?

[Joe Auty]

Thanks for this!

Unfortunately, I don't really have access to a Windows PC, and I'm  
also not sure I have enough space to both store an image, and extract  
the files from the image to the same hard drive...

I'm thinking of trying the instructions here:

http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/#copydisk

and using growfs to grow the partition size. I'm just not sure how to  
determine how many sectors I should grow the disk to, but perhaps I  
can cross that bridge when it comes... any ideas?


On Feb 14, 2006, at 12:50 PM, fbsd_user wrote:

> I use the Norton ghost program. You have to first install ghost on a
> window box and then create a  ms/dos bootable floppy with ghost on
> it. Them boot your FreeBSD box with that floppy and ghost image the
> hard drive with mbr to cdrom or dvd. You can then boot the target
> box with that same floppy and restore the cdrom/dvd even if the hd
> is bigger than the source one.
>
> Using 2003 version of ghost I first zero out all the free space on
> FreeBSD so ghost will compress it in the backup image which makes
> ghost run faster on bkup and restore.
>
>
>     dd if=/dev/zero of=/filler bs=1m ; rm /filler
>     dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/filler bs=1m ; rm /tmp/filler
>     dd if=/dev/zero of=/usr/filler bs=1m ; rm /usr/filler
>     dd if=/dev/zero of=/var/filler bs=1m ; rm /var/filler
>
> Of course this is a hands on method. You have to have physical
> access to the source and target pc's to do this.
>
> -----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 11:49 AM
> To: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> Subject: best approach to clone a disk?
>
>
> Okay,
>
> In taking the advice of an earlier poster in suggesting that the
> instructions located here:
>
> http://www.unixcities.com/howto/
>
> Are rather old, allow me to make my question a little broader in
> scope:
>
> What is the best way to clone a disk in FreeBSD? Do you have any
> step-
> by-step instructions? The instructions I used above (even replacing
> the restore -r flag with a -x) produced a core dump.
>
> Can I use DD on two disks of different size? Do you recommend Ghost
> for Unix? Any other suggestions or recommendations should the dump
> command just not work for me?
>
>
> Thanks in advance!
>
>
>
>
> -----------
> Joe Auty
> NetMusician: web publishing software for musicians
> http://www.netmusician.org
> joe at netmusician.org
>
>
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