I'm trying to come up with an "imaging" type solution (a.k.a. Norton Ghost, Imagecast) with standard unix utils. I'd like to just image one of our FreeBSD servers so I can use the hot swap HD's. If one fails, I could slide in an exact duplicate HD and the server would be back up. I've tried just doing something with dd like: dd if=(hd1) of=(hd2) but it's not going to be that simple. I don't think dd is happy about not having a filesystem on hd2 (it's a blank unused drive). I have had luck with tarring up the whole drive, installing a minimal FreeBSD install on the second drive, renaming the kernel, dropping to single user mode, and then untarring, but that takes away the point of having something quick and ready to deploy.

I've also thought about running two mirrored drives (just like scsi+raid) but in an IDE system. Then having the secondary drive deactivated, but ready to go in case the first one fails. Then just tell the bios (through remote console interface) to boot from the slave drive. Thanks in advance for any ideas.