Re: [Expert] Duplicating a drive

[paul]

D. R. Evans wrote:
> I am getting SMART errors from a drive, so I want to do the following:
>
> 1. Install a larger drive as hdb
> 2. Duplicate hda (which is running Mandrake 9.2) on to hdb
> 3. Take out hda (and throw it away) and move the drive that was hdb into
> the hda slot.
> 4. Boot and have *everything* work as if I had done nothing.
>
> Is there a way to do step 2?
>
> And for bonus points: what is that way? :-)
>
> As you can probably imagine, there's some urgency to this. Installing brand
> new (more recent) OS on this machine is not very feasible, because
> duplicating the behaviour (configuration, etc.) of all the software would
> cause a lot more downtime; so I can do that only if there is no way to
> perform the steps described above.
>
>   Doc
>
> PS I think that this is the kind of thing that Norton "Ghost" does, but
> according to their web site that's a Windows-only solution.

dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb conv=noerror,sync

You can even use it instead of Norton Ghost on Windows drives, if you 
boot from a live CD/DVD