[ale] Disk Drive Legerdemain

[Jeff Hubbs]

I want to get really good at replicating disk drives.

My objective is to be able to take a given disk drive (not part of a 
RAID set or anything like that), hook up a second drive of arbitrary 
capacity (as long as there is enough room for all partition contents), 
and turn the second drive into a working duplicate of the first drive.

I will want to retain any bootloader in the transition, to include LILO, 
NT/2K's loader, what have you.  The partition table may be different, if 
only out of necessity due to the drives being different sizes and 
geometries.  

Keeping in mind that I want to be able to go from basically any drive to 
any other drive, how should I proceed?  I am sure that dd would figure 
into this, especially with respect to the bootloader issue.  However, 
what I'm unclear on is how to copy partition contents when the 
partitions are unequal on unequal drives.  I know you can really mess up 
a drive this way.  

It occurs to me that if I start with a drive with NTFS partitions, I 
can't just mount source and target partitions and either rsync or cp 
between them.  How could I use dd in such a case?

Thanks,

- Jeff


---
This message has been sent through the ALE general discussion list.
See http://www.ale.org/mailing-lists.shtml for more info. Problems should be 
sent to listmaster at ale dot org.