best approach to clone a disk?

[Joe Auty]

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!