dd - cloning a disk.

[Wojciech Puchar]

>
> Here is a simple (I think!) question for the I/O savy among you:
>
> If I had two identical disks, say, 73 GB Seagate 10K SCSIs, one completely 
> operational fully setup FreeBSD with all the trimmings, and the other blank, 
> or perhaps loaded but no longer usable, is 'dd' and appropriate tool to 
> completely clone the Good disk to the not so good disk....therefor making the 
> second disk identical to the first? Bootable and all?

yes

dd if=/dev/firstdisk of=/dev/seconddisk bs=64k

and yes it is bootable, but if you boot from second disk, FreeBSD kernel 
will mount root from first disk anyway, unless you will reconfigure it.

so for booting from 2-nd disk, swap SCSI IDs