dd cloning slightly different disks

[Mike Clarke]

On Tuesday 30 March 2010, Christoph Kukulies wrote:

> At the moment I'm copying (dd) from the WD internal disk to the SSD
> which I had put into
> an external SATA Icybox.
>
> I'm hoping to be able to use my FreeBSD and Windows partitions
> afterwards somehow,
> possibly with some geometry tweaking or what. Due to the different
> disk geometry
> I'm expecting that the partition table entries will be wrong.

Having created problems for myself by doing something similar in the 
past I'd be wary of using dd for this, 
<http://preview.tinyurl.com/yzckfx5> will take you to Google Groups for 
the relevant thread in comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc.

The safe approach would be to use fdisk to create the desired slices on 
the new disk, use bsdlabel to partition the FreeBSD slice and then use 
dump|restore to copy the data.

You should be able to copy your Windows partition with DriveImage XML, 
free for private use from <http://www.runtime.org/driveimage-xml.htm>

-- 
Mike Clarke