[nmglug] cloning HD

[Eric Krieger]

I do put /home on it's own partition on some servers with a high
volume of users but in most cases I map it to SAN storage via
NFS,iSCSI or FC.  Another reason to do so is if you have a
directory(ies) on the same partition as /home that grow out of control
and eats into the storage to be used for /home.

- Eric




On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 10:53 AM, BrianO'Keefe <okeefe at cybermesa.com> wrote:
> Thanks to both Eric and Nick. this is what I recall from my last cloning
> operation years ago but the "how-to" I found confused me. I'll just clone
> the whole drive and then resize later as needed, if needed. the other idea I
> have is to put my home directory on a separate partition on the new drive
> but that seems rather unnecessary. It is my home folder that is the largest
> folder on the / directory so I wouldn't accomplish anything by having a
> separate partition. I think....
>
> Brian
>
> On 01/04/2011 10:39 AM, Eric Krieger wrote:
>>
>> No need to either…  the command...
>>
>> dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=1M conv=notrunc,noerror
>>
>>
>> ...will copy everything from hard drive sda to sdb  (i.e. all
>> partitions, swap and all data), a true clone.  No need to create
>> partitions or format them on the target hard drive as the dd command
>> will create them because it is copy of every single block of sda.
>>
>> Now if you where copying a single partition to a new drive yes you
>> would have to create the target partition on the new hard drive.
>>
>> dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sdb1 bs=1M conv=notrunc,noerror
>>
>> In the command above this would clone partition 1 on drive sda to
>> partition 1 on drive sdb.  In this case you would not need to format
>> the new target partition either as it is again copying every block of
>> partition 1 of the source sda1 to the target sdb1.
>>
>> Hope this helps.
>>
>> - Eric
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 10:18 AM, BrianO'Keefe<okeefe at cybermesa.com>
>>  wrote:
>>>
>>> So do I need to create the partition on the new drive or just format the
>>> drive to ext4 and then use Nick's dd command?
>>>
>>> On 01/03/2011 02:20 PM, Nick Frost wrote:
>>>
>>> On Jan 3, 2011, at 1:59 PM, Eric Krieger wrote:
>>>
>>> How are you cloning the drive?   Are you connecting the new drive to
>>> the system via some sort of usb or firewire enclosure? Running...
>>>
>>> dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb
>>>
>>> Will copy all partitions from sda to sdb and just expand sda1 on the
>>> new drive once it's finished.  Granted it's not the fastest method but
>>> it works.
>>>
>>> The above works well, but I've had slightly better results with;
>>>
>>> dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=1M conv=notrunc,noerror
>>>
>>> - Nick
>>> ---------------------------------------
>>> Nicholas S. Frost
>>> 7 Avenida Vista Grande #325
>>> Santa Fe, NM  87508
>>> nickf at frostitute.com
>>> ----------------------------------------
>>>
>>>
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