Using dd to Make a Clone of a Drive

[Martin McCormick]

	After installing FreeBSD5.4, the ISC dhcp server and ISC bind
on a hard drive, I wanted to clone that drive to a second drive so as
to generate a second server, using what I had already installed as a
template.  I used the following command:

dd if=/dev/da0 of=/dev/da1 bs=512

	It turns out that dd defaults to 512-byte blocks so I didn't
really need the bs=512, but I am not sure I haven't made some other
type of mistake.  The dd command has been running for about 4 hours on
a very fast system, with a 1-gig processor, 1 gig of RAM and two 31-GB
drives.  One would think it should have finished by now, but it is
still running.  Is this a valid method of copying the entire contents
of one drive to another?  Thank you.


Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
Systems Engineer
OSU Information Technology Department Network Operations Group