dd
From Initq
dd is the best to copy bit by bit. To copy a whole drive you can do
Let's say we have two drives, sda is our orginal drive and sdb is the new drive.
- dd if=/dev/sda of=sda.boot bs=512 count=1
- copy the boot sector from sda
- dd if=/dev/sda of=sda.iso
- copy the whole sda drive to a file
- dd if=sda.boot of=/dev/sdb bs=512 count=1
- copy the boot sector to new drive
- dd if=sda.iso of=/dev/sdb
- copy the info from sda.iso to the new drive
Status of dd
When you are copying with dd you might want to get the status of what dd is doing.
$ pgrep -l '^dd$' 6074 dd lexiana:~# ps -eaf | grep dd root 2 0 0 18:52 ? 00:00:00 [kthreadd] root 6074 5942 11 20:37 pts/0 00:02:52 dd if /dev/sda of sda.iso root 6321 5851 0 21:02 pts/1 00:00:00 grep dd $ kill -USR1 6074 60345193+0 records in 60345193+0 records out 30896738816 bytes (31 GB) copied, 1597.27 s, 19.3 MB/s $ watch -n 10 kill -USR1 6074
