clone a drive, no raid involved

[D G Teed]

On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 1:08 PM, Brad Mettee <bmettee at pchotshots.com> 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?


You've got lots of useful answers on duplicating the system other ways,
but I thought I'd mention that dd's performance can be enhanced by
providing a blocksize.  You might want to time some reads and writes
with a set of numbers that divides evenly into the byte count of your disk.
Years ago I found I could write a 40 GB laptop (4200RPM) disk in
21 minutes rather than one hour.

--Donald