[olug] using dd to clone a drive

[Dan Linder]

On Wed, Apr 20, 2016 at 8:27 PM, Kevin <sharpestmarble at gmail.com> wrote:

> Rob has a good point about other hardware being bad, too. Maybe something
> like this: `dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/null` as a test for reading the disk?
>

To defend against Murphys Law as much as possible (i.e. the /dev/sda has
only one more "read" left in it), if you have the space write the data to a
file on your HDD instead.  If the source does die completely you at least
have something, and there are ways to mount the raw "dd" image even if it's
borked and retrieve some data off it.

Of course if "sda" is a 1TB HDD and you only have a 256GB drive available,
well...

Dan

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