On Mon, 3 Jan 2005 15:30:34 -0600, Shawn Fertch <sfertch at gmail.com> wrote: > I have a server that I need to replace the OS drive in. My thoughts > were to do the following to replace it: > > -Connect replacement drive to system. > -Boot to a live cd such as Knoppix > -Use dd to moves files from old drive to new using syntax similar to: > > dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb > > Seems fairly straightforward. However, the questions I have are: > > -Will dd copy over the partition information as well, or should I > create the partions by hand and then use dd on each partition such as: > dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/dev/hdb1 As specified, yes, it will copy partition information over, including the read-only / partition. I would do as you state here, partition by partition, and create/format partitions on the new drive first. I might even take it a step further and just use cp (with appropriate flags to preserve attributes, permissions, f/m/atimes, etc.) . It wouldn't take that much longer. > -Do I need to specify any block sizes or error correcting? I've never had to specify block sizes for it to work. I usually will say 2k or 512b though, as I usually use dd to pull backup/forensic images of drives, and there's a bit of funkiness with how dd deals with a drive where the selected bs is not a divisor (evenly divides) of the drive capacity > The cause for replacing the drive is that the root ( / ) partition has > marked itself as read-only. Doing fsck's and rebooting is no longer > correcting the issue. In doing a dd from one drive to the other, is > there a chance that whatever is marking the partition read-only will > be brought over as well? I think dd would carry that over for sure. Of course, that depends on how/why it's being marked read-only. Not that stating the obvious helps out at all... > Anything else that I seem to be overlooking? Seems logical to me... Good luck. _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota Help beta test TCLUG's potential new home: http://plone.mn-linux.org Got pictures for TCLUG? Beta test http://plone.mn-linux.org/gallery tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list