Hard Drive Ghosting

Hard Drive Ghosting

[Doug]

Can a Linux hard drive be ghosted?? If so, which ghost programme must
be used and what environment must it be run?

Thanks
Doug VE5DA

Re: Hard Drive Ghosting

[Douglas Cole]

On 3/2/06, Doug <appld@sasktel.net> wrote:
> Can a Linux hard drive be ghosted?? If so, which ghost programme must
> be used and what environment must it be run?
>
> Thanks
> Doug VE5DA
>
>
Norton Ghost will copy a Linux hard drive (ext2 filesystems anyway)...

Not sure about any others.

If the source and destination drives are the same architecture/size
then just use 'dd'  ;^}

--
Doug
N7BFS

Re: Hard Drive Ghosting

[Curt Mills]

On Thu, 2 Mar 2006, Douglas Cole wrote:

> If the source and destination drives are the same architecture/size
> then just use 'dd'  ;^}

I've done this several times.  It's quite fast too!

-- 
Curt, WE7U.				archer at eskimo dot com
http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
  Lotto:  A tax on people who are bad at math. - unknown
Windows:  Microsoft's tax on computer illiterates. - WE7U.
The world DOES revolve around me:  I picked the coordinate system!"

Re: Hard Drive Ghosting

[Brett Mueller]

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On 3/2/2006 17:00, Douglas Cole wrote:
> On 3/2/06, Doug <appld@sasktel.net> wrote:
>>Can a Linux hard drive be ghosted?? If so, which ghost programme must
>>be used and what environment must it be run?
> 
> Norton Ghost will copy a Linux hard drive (ext2 filesystems anyway)...

- From Symantec site on Ghost:
"Sector-based and file-based disk imaging creates file images of any
FAT, NTFS, EXT2, and EXT3 file system"

Looks like it must be run from Windows.

> If the source and destination drives are the same architecture/size
> then just use 'dd'  ;^}

As Curt and Doug both mention, "dd" is perfect for doing sector-level
copying under native Linux.  "cp -a" and/or "rsync -a" (if you are
updating an archive) are good tools for copying at the filesystem level...

73,

Brett

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Re: Hard Drive Ghosting

[Curt, WE7U]

On Thu, 2 Mar 2006, Brett Mueller wrote:

> As Curt and Doug both mention, "dd" is perfect for doing sector-level
> copying under native Linux.  "cp -a" and/or "rsync -a" (if you are
> updating an archive) are good tools for copying at the filesystem level...

I've done it via booting from a Tom's Root/Boot floppy disk, copying
a 6.4GB drive to an identical 6.4GB drive.

I might not get the command exactly right here, but it was something
like this

    dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=512

It copies every sector until it runs out of sectors, so it copies
all of the empty space, windows partitions, linux partitions, boot
sectors, etc.  From the hda drive to the hdb drive in the above
command, in case that isn't obvious (don't want to copy in the wrong
direction now do we?).

--
Curt, WE7U.   APRS Client Comparisons: http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
"Lotto:    A tax on people who are bad at math." -- unknown
"Windows:  Microsoft's tax on computer illiterates." -- WE7U
"The world DOES revolve around me:  I picked the coordinate system!"

Re: Hard Drive Ghosting

[Nate Bargmann]

* Doug <appld@sasktel.net> [2006 Mar 02 18:33 -0600]:
> Can a Linux hard drive be ghosted?? If so, which ghost programme must
> be used and what environment must it be run?

I've used rsync with good results moving stuff from one partition to
another.

73, de Nate >>

-- 
 Wireless | Amateur Radio Station N0NB          |  Successfully Microsoft
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Re: Hard Drive Ghosting

[Vic]

> Can a Linux hard drive be ghosted?? If so, which ghost programme must
> be used and what environment must it be run?

dd is the way to do it if you want a genuine clone.

Make sure you've got DMA turned on on the drives you want to use (use
hdparm to check/set this) - it takes *forever* if you don't.

Then use something like :-

dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=8192

(This will clone all of hda to hdb - you could do individual partitions
here if you want, but be sure to set up a partition table with fdisk
first).

If your source drive is broken in some way, dd_resscue is a nice variant -
it does the same as dd, but does what it can when it finds a broken
sector. It's about as good as you get without forensic data-recovery
kit...

If, on the other hand, you don't want a duplicate of the drive, you just
want to copy the files over, rsync -a is the way to go.

HTH

Vic.