[Discuss] Disk and dd question

[Patrick]

On Sat, 05 Jan 2008 11:28:09 -0800
R. Langkamer wrote:

First, thanks to you and Steven Kurylo for your quick and very
helpful responses.

> On 1/5/08 6:25 AM, Patrick wrote:
> 
> > Hi.  :-)
> > 
> > I know;
> > 	dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/path/to/file
> > will read a partition whole, and pour its contents into a file.
> > 
> > Will;
> > 	dd if=/dev/hda of=/path/to/file
> > read the *entire* contents of the disk?  `Entire' meaning MBR,
> > partition table, all partitions... the whole thing, as one file.
> > I kind of hope so.
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > Thanks,
> > 
> > Patrick.
> 
> 
> 	As has been mentioned (yes it will), one thing to be aware of, since dd 
> makes a bit for bit clone, if you have a corrupt partition table or 
> other disk geometry errors, dd will be replicating that too, so be sure 
> that the drive (or partition) you are cloning is free from errors. Not 
> much good cloning a bad disk (well except maybe in data recovery 
> efforts). ;)

This is true, and you're not far off the mark.  I have a friend
whose copy of Windows ME is singing `Bicycle Built for Two' in a
very, very *low* baritone...  ;-)  Luckily it hasn't started
calling her Dave, or shoved her out any airlocks, yet.

Anyway, before it goes completely catatonic I'd like to save as
many files as possible, some more important to her than others,
but first dd the drive just to be on the safe side.  It's an
older machine, so with any luck its /dev/hda shouldn't exceed
8GB.  She'll probably have to reinstall Windows to keep doing
what she's been doing with it, but I'll also bring a copy of
Xubuntu 7.10, just in case.

Well, those are my immediate plans.

I also have a spare 80GB HD, exactly like the one I'm writing to
you on [except for the data on it], and at some point I'd like to
clone the one onto the other.  Then, if anything goes seriously
wrong, well, just shut down and switch drives.

This wouldn't be my `usual' backup approach, but I would like to
start off with two exactly, precisely identical hard drives.
After that it's all incremental backups, except for regularly
dd-ing the /boot partition which is only 25MB anyway.

I'd want to maintain two identical MBRs, and /boots, because the
MBR points to grub's physical location on disk, so it should be
the *same* physical location, in both cases.

This was longer than I meant it to be.  Anyway...



Thanks,

Patrick.

-- 
History repeats itself.  That's one thing wrong with history.