[plug] dd speed estimates and /dev/hdx grepping

[Ryan]

Hi pluggers,

Does anyone have *any* idea how long a dd might take in the following
situation assuming everything is hunky-dory?

Celeron 300 - 128MB RAM, two identical 40GB 7200RPM drives, booted with
Debian 3.0 CD, dropped to console and:

dd if=/dev/hdd of=/dev/hda 

I of course could have written it to a file and watched it slowly grow, but
circumstances and lack of spare hard drives didn't permit that at the time.

/dev/hdd is a FAT32 win98 install that hit some filesystem 'issues' so I'm
copying it before I start playing around any more.  There are no physical
problems with the disk.

It has been going for 5 hours so far with no errors - when I switch back to
the install console the screen redraw is VERY slow - indicating the machine
is doing some thinking.

On the another note, if one wanted to grep a filesystem image for stuff, can
one do that directly on a device or would it need to be dd'd into one or
many standard files first?  'grep -b blah /dev/hda' or similar is not
doable, is there a way to do such a thing on an in-tact hard drive without
imaging it to file(s)?

Thanks,

Ryan


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