[ale] requirements for dd to mirror another hard drive ?

[Courtney Thomas]

Why do you say disaster results if MBR and the partition table are 
copied, please ?

BTW, apparently Madison was clairvoyant  :-)

Appreciatively,

Courtney

fostermail at bellsouth.net wrote:
> The iota known here includes "dd."  One used to use it to zero out the first 512 bytes of a DOS partition.
> 
> You would like dd if the drive mirrored is identical, in which case you slap it in and it boots 'n runs.  If not, (and not using partimage, as suggested,) convenience requires both " e.g.  dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=512 seek=1 skip=1," (This copies everything except the MBR and partition table, which is mostly a disastrous thing to do.) and creating a partition the same size as what dd says was copied, like has to be done with ntfsresize and (afaik) parted. I'm going to look into partimage.
> 
> GRUB is in the first 446 bytes of the 512, the partition table is in the difference. (This is ale, not the U.N.)
> 
> 5225 something Hgwy, 
> Stone Mtn 
> 
>  "If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy." -James Madison" -not to mention being flat broke
> 
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