Filesystems, Disks and Memory

I have a drive that I need to make a sector-by-sector or exact image copy of. In Windows, I use a program call Ghost by Symantec, but the version I have does not support Unix.

Does anyone know of a good product for Unix?

Thanks,

Brett Gibson
Gibson Teldata, Inc.

You can use dd for that. Lets say you want to create an image file of hda you would use : dd if=/dev/hda of=/tmp/hdaimage.

If you got 2 identical disks you could mirror them like this :
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb

Upgrade your version of Ghost. We have it and it works well. However.. let me caution you on something... When you make exact duplicates of hard drives, I assume that you are changing the liscensing information on the duplicated drive... Right?? Right??? Right???? =)

Maybe he's setting up a homebrew MirrorDisk

# crontab -l

* * * * * dd if=/dec/hdc of=/dev/hdd >/dev/null 2>&1

One guy reportedly did this with cat:

# cat /dev/hda >/dev/hdb

The disks were 100% identical, important for such things as sector sizes, etc.

The paranoid way would be to make filesystem, mount the second disk, and use cp -r.

This is what I do when I add one disk and, fx. move the /usr or /home tree to the new disk

Atle

It's OK to do it with cat as well... I think people use dd because you have a little more control (blocksize, count size, etc...) than with cat.
I think it's the FreeBSD Install manual that says: to create the floppy boot image, simply cat boot.flp > /dev/fd0

A not-so-known thing about FreeBSD:
I wanted to duplicate a disk, but couldn't for the life of me get it to work - how the H#&& do I get the SCSI-emulator to work, grrrr!!
Then I found burncd, worked right off the IDE, just like I would have done it.
".. just like I would have ... hmm, lets try .."

# cat /dev/acd0 >file.iso

YES! That is the way to duplicate a disk under FreeBSD:

You cat the CD and pipe it to the CD-R!

I became a _dedicated_ BSD fan after that :-)

Atle