Cloning a disk -large to small

[Grant Peel]

Hi all,

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

The clones are done, and everything seems to be working fine. 

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?

Of course I ask the questing with the caveat that one of the file systems final size (on the 36 GB disk) would of course have to suffer.

So lets say we had a brand new freebsd setup on a 74 G disk

        swap        2GB
/        ufs         2 GB
/usr    ufs        5 GB
/var    ufs        5 GB
/home    ufs    60 GB

and wanted to copy it using 'dd' to a 36 GIG drive, even though there obviously would not be enough room for /home to be the original size? Can 'dd' be set to truncate a fs? Can the (/home) filesystem geometry be corrected after a regular 'dd' to the new drive?

-Grant