Very Computer

Anyone know of a simple utility to allow hard drives to be replicated
quickly and easily. I want to make exact copies of one hard drive to many
others. Drives are formated in either etx3 or reizer FS.

Any help appreciated.

Thanks

Norton ghost or power quest utility (PQDI) will both do the job well.

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Quote:> Anyone know of a simple utility to allow hard drives to be replicated
> quickly and easily. I want to make exact copies of one hard drive to many
> others. Drives are formated in either etx3 or reizer FS.

> Any help appreciated.

> Thanks

when both hd are connected on the same machine, dd should do the trick

dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/dev/hda2 ...

(I am not used to dd, so its better to check the man page before :-)

Seb

Are these drives identical? Then the easiest way is probably
# cp /dev/hda /dev/hdb

Note that this is using raw device files, not a file system. Therefore
it will correctly copy everything including special files and links and
whatever (I do this on a semi regular basis). It is doing a bit for bit
copy of the disk. Unfortunately, it is copying every bit, regardless of
whether there is actually any file data located there, so it is a little
slow. To copy a 20G takes about 35 minutes, which translates into a
sustained transfer rate of about 10MB/second. Be sure to enable DMA on
IDE disks, or it will take a VERY long time. The other problem with this
method is a lack of a progress status indication.

Some advantages. There is no need to format or partition the destination
disk. This will correctly create and copy primary, extended, boot, even
Windoze partitions.

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Barry

        That would result in copying from primary partition 1 to primary
partition 2 on the same hard disk.  I don't think this is what you want.
If you had the second hard disk installed as /dev/hdc, the command would
be "dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdc" -- this would work, but has the drawback
that it will not detect any bad sectors on the destination drive.  It will
also waste time copying unused sectors.

        This one also has the disadvantage of not detecting bad sectors
on the destination drive.  In my experience, hard drives do develop bad
sectors (or even fail more seriously) at a significant rate.  This is
particularly true of laptop hard drives, which both get handled more and
seem to be less resistant to random failure than desktop hard drives (even
though the laptop hard drives should be more shock resistant).

        For instructions on copying one hard drive to another, read the
http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/mini/Hard-Disk-Upgrade/index.html "Hard Disk
Upgrade Mini HOWTO", but with the caveat that the "-x" option (stay in one
file system) option of the "cp" command does not work in some versions of
the GNU fileutils (this was being fixed last year, but some old versions are
almost assuredly floating around).  You can also use a tarball intermediate
to copy hard drives -- use "tar -zcvpf tarball.tgz -T filelist.txt" on the
source end and "tar -zxvpf tarball.tgz" on the destination end and then fix
Lilo after finishing the restore.  (Replace "tarball.tgz" with the appropriate
tarball path and name; replace filelist.txt with the name of a text file that
contains the names of the directories in files at the top-level of the source
hard drive, but with /mnt and /proc removed; manually create empty /mnt and
/proc directories and subdirectories of the /mnt directory on the destination
hard drive.)

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