[sclug] dd question

[James Fidell]

Quoting Pieter Claassen (pieter at openauth.co.uk):

> The two drives that I am copying are exactly the same on the same
> motherboard.
> 
> The swap partition might be a problem and I wonder if disabling swapping for
> the copy might not be a good idea? Everything should happen in ram anyhow
> since the bs is only 4Mb.

I'd not worry about it unless you think the copy is causing the system to
use swap.

> I expected that if I make sure that the root partition is only ro and swap
> is off that there should not be a problem copying the disk. What happens to
> the proc filesystem with a dd?

The proc filesystem doesn't really exist, so it won't be a problem.

Mounting root ro may cause some oddities but nothing serious that I can
think of.  Possibly you'd be best off booting into single-user and doing
the copy then.

Running something like hdparm -t on each system might be interesting,
just to compare results.

James