dd to clone disks - new disk fails to boot.

[krad]

On 20 October 2010 14:55, Warren Block <wblock at wonkity.com> wrote:

> On Wed, 20 Oct 2010, Modulok wrote:
>
>  Problem: I copied from an old hard drive to a new one via FreeBSD's
>> dd. The new drive won't boot. The old drive worked fine. (The new
>> drive is known-to-work.)
>>
>> Background: I have a system with a 160GB disk in it. It runs windows.
>> It works. I have a blank 250GB disk. I want to copy the entire 160GB
>> disk onto the 250GB disk, shuffle the SATA cables and boot to it.
>> Basically, I'm just replacing the small hard drive with a larger one.
>> I would then extend the partition using something like gpartd.
>>
>> I booted to a live FreeBSD disk and used dd like so:
>>
>>   dd if=/dev/ad4 of=/dev/ad8 bs=1m
>>
>> About an hour later it finished. No errors. I turned the machine off,
>> unplugged the small disk and connected the big disk into the primary
>> SATA header. The BIOS chokes on the new disk. It refuses to boot from
>> it and instead reports 'disk error'.
>>
>
> If the BIOS is complaining, see if the new drive has a SATA 150 jumper, or
> some other compatibility mode.
>
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if you still get problems, try reinstalling the boot blocks

for mbr

fdisk -B adx
bsdlabel -B adxs1a

for gpt

gpart bootcode -p /boot/gptboot -i 1 adx

if that doesnt work try stepping around the problem. dd should work but it
may be quicker to manually partition/slice up the new drive, newfs it, and
rsync the files accross. I have used this method many times in the past, and
if its a big drive with low utilization it will actually be quicker than dd.

rsync might miss a few of the chflag attributes if its an os install drive,
but they will be restored next time you make world.