[Nottingham] HDD cloning via LAN

[Cam]

Martin

> Also, I'm wanting to copy over the partition tables, linux, and windozy 
> stuff... Hence "dd" rather than "tar".

It's very much faster to copy the contents of a half-full filesystem 
than to copy the whole disk.

If you are booting from the same disk you are updating you are asking 
for trouble - so try a cdrom based boot or something that leaves the HD 
in an unmounted state before you start writing to it with dd ;-)

If you want to copy the disk a partition at a time you could use a 
hybrid approach, using sfdisk to copy the partition table, then mounting 
the native filesystems and using rsync to copy the contents over. Non 
native partitions could still be copied raw using dd.

> Others must have to do this on occasion... (;-|)

I've done it for embedded systems.

An alternative is to pull out the HDs and put them in a desktop PC with 
a 2.5 -> 3.5 cable, that would be fast.

I don't think the encryption on ssh will slow down the process, although 
it does depend on the CPU, the network speed and the hard disk speed 
(the disk is likely to be the bottleneck).

-Cam
-- 
camilo at mesias.co.uk                                                 <--