Very Computer

I have 2 identiacl 1.6 gig drives.
One is partitioned and full of data, being used as our server.
The other is not being used, but containes one linux partition
with no usefull data.

I wanted to mirror hda onto hdb, so out of curiosity, I tried
        cp /dev/hda /dev/hdb

It seemed to copy the partition table and the data.

Did it really do that. If I were to swap the drives would things work?

Thanks

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I don't think so.
  All you did was overwrite the file /dev/hdb with the file /dev/hda.
  So now the file /dev/hdb points to the device driver for drive a just
  as /dev/hda does. I don't think the copy physically did anything to
  drive b.

  Check the dev directory and look at the major and minor numbers for
  hda and hdb. they should be different. If they are the same then they
  are both "pointing" to the save physical drive. In your case drive a.

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Quote:> I have 2 identiacl 1.6 gig drives.
> One is partitioned and full of data, being used as our server.
> The other is not being used, but containes one linux partition
> with no usefull data.
> I wanted to mirror hda onto hdb, so out of curiosity, I tried

If they're not the same size you can use dump and restore, there's an
example in the SunOS man pages.

Quote:>    cp /dev/hda /dev/hdb
> It seemed to copy the partition table and the data.
> Did it really do that. If I were to swap the drives would things work?

-Paul-

--

'dd bs=5120 if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb'

This will do an exact copy for you. If you want more information on the
parameters used check out the man pages.  But quickly, if=infile,
of=outfile, bs=block size, which should be a multiple of 512.  The
larger the block size the quicker the copying will be.

--

Truly Yours,
N'kosi Baruti Tyehimba

________________________________________________________________
There is no personal problem, no matter how great it might seem,
that can't be taken care of with enough high explosives.
________________________________________________________________

-Rick

Bye,
Tom
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