behaviour after cloning a disk

[Koh Choon Lin]

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.

I used to perform this for forensic purposes. This method only works
for cloning a sdb that is smaller than sdd8. The partition table will
be exactly the same and bootable. However, assuming sdd8 is 200 GiB,
it will be reduced to 20 GiB since the table is a clone of sdb. As
such, unless this is a short term arrangement, this way of cloning is
not recommended.



-- 
Regards
Koh Choon Lin