dd cloning slightly different disks

[illoai at gmail.com]

On 30 March 2010 12:11, Jerry McAllister <jerrymc at msu.edu> wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 05:47:44PM +0200, Christoph Kukulies wrote:
>
>> Though not 100% FreeBSD centric, my question, I know that disk
>> partitioning experts are around here.
>> My noteook HD is a WD 5000BEVT, (500GB). Today I bought a Kingston SDnowV+
>> Solid State drive, 512GB, with the intention to make my notebook a bit
>> faster. It's an Intel Core 2 Duo,
>> 7400 CPU.
>>
>> The WD disk shows as having 976773168 sectors (500108 MB),
>> the SSD has 1000215216 sectors (512110 MB).
>>
>> At the moment I'm copying (dd) from the WD internal disk to the SSD
>> which I had put into
>> an external SATA Icybox.
>>
>> I'm hoping to be able to use my FreeBSD and Windows partitions
>> afterwards somehow,
>> possibly with some geometry tweaking or what. Due to the different disk
>> geometry
>> I'm expecting that the partition table entries will be wrong.
>>
>> Any clues how I should proceed when the copy will be done in 7 hours or
>> so? (20MB/s
>> is the transfer rate I got from a short test that I did before starting
>> the big copy).
>
> Well, this could possibly work, but I wonder why you want to do it
> this way.    I would be inclined to divide the disk as desired, do
> the MSW install in the first slice and then get a FeeBSD fixit and
> partition the other slice and then use dump/restore to move the FreeBSD
> stuff over.   That way you get the best fit for the new disk, no
> worries about tweaking geometry and no loss of the amount the new
> drive is bigger than the old one.
>
> ////jerry
>

Or even a middle path of creating the slices, making sure
that the windows-to-be slice is exactly close enough, dd-ing
the windows slice over (testing that it boots), and then
running the dump/restore cycle for the freebsd portion of
the drive.

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