Fedora 10 harddrive exact cloning?

h2009 · 24 Jan 2012 at 23:41

Hi there,
I'm thinking about changing an HDD in my Fedora system to something a little more robust but I was wondering how I would go about making an exact clone of the existing drive which I could simply swap over (without downtime - other than the hardware change).

What I'd like to know is how or what is the best method of doing this?

Thank you.

SMN · 25 Jan 2012 at 10:07

Use "dd".

http://www.backuphowto.info/linux-backup-hard-disk-clone-dd

Grimbough · 25 Jan 2012 at 14:14

I'll second "dd", it worked perfectly for me when I was doing exactly what you're proposing, upgrading the OS drive without wanting to use a fresh install.

h2009 · 31 Jan 2012 at 18:19

Hi sorry is there no GUI software that can be used. I really don't like the command line in linux because I don't actually understand what i'm doing and I cannot afford to lose the information.

KIA · 31 Jan 2012 at 18:50

http://clonezilla.org/

h2009 · 31 Jan 2012 at 19:12

Ok I've decided to use dd but its found some bad sectors on the existing driving. What would be the correct synx to use to pass through them?

h2009 · 1 Feb 2012 at 08:10

It seems just about everything I'm trying is failing. I'm now attempting ddrescue but its cloning at a speed of less than 1kb (whereas before it was doing around 250mb a sec.

Is there anything else I can do it speed this up?

SMN · 1 Feb 2012 at 08:46

What command did you run? Its fairly simple to use DD, so im a little confused how its mucked up.

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb

Where /dev/sda is the drive you are copying, and /dev/sdb is the drive you are copying to.

h2009 · 1 Feb 2012 at 09:05

Hi that is right but because I have bad sectors I've run gddrescue -v /dev/sda /dev/sdb
But the problem is the cloning has really slowed down from 250mb to 1kb.
Does anyone know if I quit the process and restart it will it continue from where it was? What happens if I put it on another computer to recover will it continue?

SMN · 1 Feb 2012 at 09:27

So... your running gddrescue at the same time as DD'ing?

h2009 · 1 Feb 2012 at 10:07

No sorry. Dd failed because of bad sectors, so I loaded gddrescue to bypass the sectors.
The OS is a live cd, so nothing is happening on the orginial disk.

CaptainCrash · 1 Feb 2012 at 10:14

If the disk is bad, I reckon you'd be better off doing a clean install to be on the safe side - even if you're able to skip the bad sectors with a cloning operation, you may have some as-yet-undiscovered corrupted or missing data which could cause problems in the future.

SMN · 1 Feb 2012 at 10:22

Hmm. If the rescue has finished id run a SMART test on it, and show the stats here. If its truly goosed, as per the gent above id just get your data off and fresh install.