FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE-p7 i386 system drive imaging and migration

[Brandon J. Wandersee]

David Christensen writes:

> What is the proper way to clone a FreeBSD system image from one drive to 
> another?

In my personal opinion, the "proper" way is to back up your data, create
a fresh partition table and filesystems on the new disk, and restore the
backup. Using `dd` to clone an entire disk byte-for-byte works, but it's
the painfully slow, tedious, and potentially dangerous way of doing
this. The native backup utilities---dump(8) and restore(8) for UFS, `zfs
send` and `zfs receive` for ZFS---will copy the data from an existing
filesystem and write to a new filesystem at speeds exponentially greater
than anything you'll get from `dd`.

However, I'm not sure that addresses the actual problem in this
particular case. I can't say exactly what the error message you're
getting means, but while it might stem from how you copied the system it
might also imply a problem with the disk itself. Unrecoverable read
errors, maybe.

-- 
::  Brandon J. Wandersee
::  brandon.wandersee at gmail.com
::  --------------------------------------------------
::  'The best design is as little design as possible.'
::  --- Dieter Rams ----------------------------------