clone a drive, no raid involved

[Alexander Motin]

Brad Mettee wrote:
> I'm setting up a pair of machines with almost identical OS config, and 
> completely identical hardware. One is a primary DNS server, the other is 
> secondary. NS1 will also serve web, NS2 will be a mail server. Both are 
> low volume/loads.
> 
> It looks like I can use DD to copy an entire drive, but it's a 500G 
> drive and that's going to take a really long time (especially since it's 
> brand new with no data besides base OS).
> 
> My question: Is there a better way to duplicate a drive including boot 
> info?

Partition second drive (I usually prefer sysinstall which also installs 
loaders), mount it and use dump/restore:

cd /mnt
dump -aLf - -C32 / | restore -rf -

-- 
Alexander Motin