| brent timothy saner on 18 Jul 2015 18:08:26 -0700 |
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| Re: [PLUG] Cloning a dying hard drive |
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512 On 07/18/2015 09:01 PM, Clay wrote: > Hi Rich, > > This could very well be a personal preference. I think it also depends > on the external drive > in question. Many are preformatted for WIndows or Mac. I guess I should > have included that > part.. if the drive is preformatted then I would remove the partition(s) > and create a new partition > for good measure. I have not tested imaging a drive without fdisking it > first. I will now just to > see what happens. > > Cheers, > Clay > Clay- To save you the trouble, when you clone an entire *device* (e.g. /dev/sda), the partition table is cloned along with it (the parititon table exists in the first 512 bytes of the drive for DOS/MBR partition tables, and ALL over the place for GPT (primary is at the end of the device, if I recall). So you really don't need to create any sort of partitions if you're cloning an entire device to an entire device (e.g. /dev/sda => /dev/sdb). It doesn't matter if the drive has been pre-formatted, as that filesystem (NTFS/FAT*/HFS/HFS+/etc.) is "unstructured" and is just dumb flipped bits on a disk, waiting to be written over, when you apply another filesystem (ext3, ext2, ext4, whatever) on top of it, and they're almost useless without a matching partition table. In other words, there is absolutely no prep work needed for a destination disk when cloning on a block level (as dd, and dd-based, tools do). Well, other than maybe a badblocks[0] and extended S.M.A.R.T. test on the destination disk first, to make sure you have a good disk you're copying to. :) https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Badblocks -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2 Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://www.enigmail.net/ iQIcBAEBCgAGBQJVqvh6AAoJEIwATC+TSB9rs+IP/jpUbb6Ksl1wc7HMVTR8RwDc ZIivDHs7FCSj2HIPfPHWNzUZUc27kbN45k2T1xvIopFan/H21mXuHaBzRQKHw8q5 40J05mwK64TJEZecPt5nHu6oCaRW1R2x4SSE2jfwyyQXfGzhh3MfWfR0myLc0Jhg 9DZ5W7BkOlMUc9LrSYQXpB9RTLQSJfNtZnQjQMdDVcGMje/pmL0vAZ7x0WjdhTa/ XCcqbltZT4JcvqBz3wLeS72HI4Bqm0jlEaYo/QXoMpundv5Fj1m9UcQvLr9YJlO/ be+TzQ2WJXDIbIb81hTTKiWZbE6qDM6ia/CPzF8nZeNUon0AzDg52zTRB6RAXDcU bFvR0veq1i5fVt9meKKKqIQ8Hi1wn6/78U1k0V4Ra7K5nM9yli928aeUrhoIujzG RXDaAD/hwxv4nupm3lyAQS4A3O/GgX72M45CcI3V9+w4bP9LMpWGskDcQpQOF5ho 8cxcYaXj8wgW1IRf7UxluEeP55U3J7imzIYtqP/76lwI2VBdg9GXOLSEqp8oORKb /fCOY94M1LDp6v0FMXKIW775rwenx2guttuhSOx91tNO2t4fQTSIk0CA95eAFNeY OKOesS5zRACYUKbjZM6JhHWK2uolM6GCwEQySYPiVYGYRI7THvgPBMDLuEojWWhA Lmu/mB9IgQOBhCxy4oWq =xZD+ -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ___________________________________________________________________________ Philadelphia Linux Users Group -- http://www.phillylinux.org Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce General Discussion -- http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug