[olug] [OT] Drive copy utilities?

[Rob Townley]

On 11/7/07, Kevin Hinze <kevinhinze at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Howdy folks,
>
> I am looking for a standalone disk copy utility for imaging one hard drive
> to
> another. For this particular application, I am using PATA drives. The
> source
>
> drive will be ~250 GB while the dest drive will be ~400 GB.
>
> I want something OS independent, so something that is a standalone
> bootable
> CD
> is highly preferred. Shareware and freeware is great but I am also looking
> at
> commercial software, something akin to Ghost. As an aside, Ghost might be
> too
> confusing for some end-users to easily follow instructions, but maybe not.
>
> While a roll-it-yourself Linux solution comes to mind for many folks, I'm
> not
> looking at this as a primary option, unless I've missed some great Linux
> project out there to do just this.
>
> Anyone have any ideas?
>
> Thanks,
>
> ~Kevin Hinze
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I believe all the following bootable CDs SysRescCD.org, RipLinux, knoppix
among others include these utilitites.
// find the device names of your harddrives and harddrive partitions
fdisk -lu

//Use disk duplicator to copy 4k bytes at a time
// For more on dd, google the following
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=4096

// if the drive is failing, dd_rescue will not error out on a bad read and
goes back to previously unreadable blocks to try to read them again.  It can
also read in reverse.  i am not sure ghost goes nearly as far in recovering
bad data.


If dd is too diffcult (the experimental user may overwrite the wrong drive)
for the end user, g4u  (ghost for unix) had a gui.  That FOG link looks
good.  FOG or SysRescCD over PXE looks to be convenient.  Should know in a
hour or so.