Cloning a disk -large to small

[Warren Block]

On Sun, 4 Mar 2007, Grant Peel wrote:

> I have been researching the use of 'dd' quite a bit lately as I have 
> had to clone a newly setup server.

dump/restore is generally a better solution for cloning drives.  On 
large drives, dd wastes a lot of time copying empty sectors.

> I was wondering though, if one had a newly setup disk on a 74 GB SCSI 
> dirve, is there some know turning that can be done to clone it to a 
> smaller drive? Say 36 GB?

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/disks.html#NEW-HUGE-DISK

Using dump works for going from large to small partitions, too, as long 
as the small partition is big enough to hold all the data.

-Warren Block * Rapid City, South Dakota USA