behaviour after cloning a disk

[Joep L. Blom]

On 22-12-11 00:45, J wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 17:26, Joep L. Blom<jlblom at neuroweave.nl>  wrote:
>> Hi,
>> I have a question about the behaviour of a cloned disk.
>> I want to copy a20GB disk to a partition on a much larger disk (1TB) of
>> 20GB. The disk is bootable with 2 primary partitions (1=ntfs, 1=ext3) and an
>> extendedn partition with 5 logical partitions (with different formats).
>> If I copy that disk with "dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sdd8 bs=1024" will all be
>> preserved i.e. are all partitions the same as in the old disk and is the
>> disk bootable ( and can grub find the bootable partitions automagically?).
>> You can see I don't have much experience with this so I hope somebody with
>> more experience can help me out.
>
> Is there any particular reason you want to "clone" the disk using dd?
>
> If you're only looking to preserve the files, wouldn't rsync work
> better, or even cp? Both have means of protecting ownership and
> permissions when copying files from one location to the next.
>
> Also, your dd statement isn't quite right... if you're just trying to
> copy the one partition, it would be:
>
> dd if=/dev/sdbX of=/dev/sdd8
>
> where X is the partition number of the 20GB partition you want to
> copy.  Also, just wondering if specifying a 1024k blocksize is
> necessary... dd will usually handle that automatically, unless there's
> a reason for specifying a block size.
>
> Anyway, just wondering... the important point is that, if you're just
> interested in making copies of files, cp or rsync are probably safer
> bets.
>
J,
Thanks for your answer. The reason I want to clone the disks and not 
simply copy them using rsync or cp is that the disks will be removed 
from the system (it now has 3 disks plus 2 CD-writers). However, I want 
to be able to use the OSes on these disks (1 Fedora and 1 Windows NT). 
Therefore I want to clone the complete disk and not just a partition. 
Maybe someone else can shed some light on this problem.
Joep