[sclug] Copy drive problem

[Ed Davies]

On 2013-03-01 15:42, Neil Haughton wrote:
> IDE0 slave - my old drive (two partitions, sdb1, sdb2,  mounted as /boot
> and /home )

That's /var and /home?

> Then I booted the machine, logged in, and as root ran gparted to partition
> the new drive into one about the same size as /dev/sdb1 (/var), and the
> rest for the second parition. I used the default partition table format
> (msdos), both partitions ext3 to match the 'old' partitions.

I don't think it matters what file system you put on those partitions
if you're about dd over them. The type in the partition table matters,
of course.

Also, having a bigger partition for /home won't help, I think, if
you dd on a file system set up for a smaller partition. AIUI, the
extra blocks at the end will just be ignored.

> Then I tried as root to 'dd' the sdb1 partition (/var)  to its new home:
> 
> dd if=/dev/sdb1 of=/dev/sdc1

Dunno, but it seems unwise to me to dd from a partition which is
mounted, at least if it's mounted for write. (You don't say if your
reboot changed the mounted status of this partition - probably worth
being clear about such things.)

> After a long pause the message 'read error' appeared and dd bombed out,
> with only a couple of MB transferred.  Why would this be? Have I done
> anything wrong or missed out a vital step?

Dunno again, but Alex's answer sounds the most likely to me.