dd

[taxman]

On Sunday 30 March 2003 07:57 pm, Grant Peel wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I am about to make the trip to shutdown one of our servers and 'dd' the
> first SCSI drive to the second.
>
> from what I have read, and what some of you have kindly offered, I just
> kick into single user mode, with only root mounted on the primary drive,

ro, I assume

> and away we go...
>
> dd if=/dev/da0 of=/dev/da1 bs=1m

That'll copy the data, but you'll want to prep the disk.  I've seen 
recommendations something along the lines of: read data off the whole new 
disk first  dd if=/dev/da1 of=/dev/null  then write the data you want on it, 
then read it off to /dev/null again.
Something to the effect of populating the drives on disk bad sector records.  
There may be more burn in recommended, but I couldn't find anything in the 
archives.

> One last question, the second drive is identical to the first, but should
> it be right out odf the box condition, formatted, fdisk'ed partiitioned or
> does any of that matter since it will be copies bit for bit?

None of that matters for the reason you noted.

> TIA!

np,

Tim