dd cloning slightly different disks

[Peter Steele]

Theoretically, doing a straight dd copy of one disk to another and then swapping in that disk should work. I've done it, with no other tweaking needed. I've never done it with mixed OS instances on the same disk, or for that matter with a solid state drive. You'll lose the trailing 12GB of your disk, although you might be able to expand the last partition of whatever OS uses it to include this lost space....

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org] On Behalf Of Christoph Kukulies
Sent: Tuesday, March 30, 2010 8:48 AM
To: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
Subject: dd cloning slightly different disks

Though not 100% FreeBSD centric, my question, I know that disk partitioning experts are around here.
My noteook HD is a WD 5000BEVT, (500GB). Today I bought a Kingston SDnowV+ Solid State drive, 512GB, with the intention to make my notebook a bit faster. It's an Intel Core 2 Duo,
7400 CPU.

The WD disk shows as having 976773168 sectors (500108 MB), the SSD has 1000215216 sectors (512110 MB).

At the moment I'm copying (dd) from the WD internal disk to the SSD which I had put into an external SATA Icybox.

I'm hoping to be able to use my FreeBSD and Windows partitions afterwards somehow, possibly with some geometry tweaking or what. Due to the different disk geometry I'm expecting that the partition table entries will be wrong.

Any clues how I should proceed when the copy will be done in 7 hours or so? (20MB/s is the transfer rate I got from a short test that I did before starting the big copy).

--
Christoph

_______________________________________________
freebsd-questions at freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"