[plug] "Ghosting" drives

Bernd Felsche bernie at innovative.iinet.net.au
Sat Mar 27 14:19:24 WST 2004


On Saturday 27 March 2004 14:11, smclevie at ozemail.com.au wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> How does one copy an ext3 drive to another drive which has a different
> partitioning structure?

The destination partition has to be at least as large as the
original for a copy that's not file/inode based.

> eg. Disk 1 has 5 partitions
>
> /, /swap, /usr, /home and /var
>
> Disk 2 has 7 partitions
>
> /, /swap, /usr, /var, /var/www, /home and /usr/local.
>
> I want to transfer all info to Disk 2 and then run from Disk 2 and give
> back Disk 1 to its owner.
>
> All partitions on all disks are ext3.  There are no MSDos partitions in
> sight!  Its all Linux.
>
> I run Grub by preference.
>
> How do I go about it?

Very, very carefully.

You can use dd for the actual copying of unmounted partitions.

cpio can be used for file-based copying from mounted filesystem to
mounted filesystem

I hear that 'dump' can also be used but I've avoided learning how to
use that since 1985, and I see no reason to stop avoiding.

-- 
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