Re: DD Rules

Matthew J. Roth wrote:
Karl,

For the sake of new users who are routinely instructed to research the list archives prior to asking a question, please explain the following points:

Karl Larsen wrote:
1. The destination partition MUST be at least a byte larger than the source partition where the data is coming from. This is essential!
Why must the destination partition be larger than the source partition? It is my understanding that the ideal situation is for both partitions to be the same size.
It is hard to be sure of partition size. I was using two Hard Drives with exactly the same number of total cylinders to make the same 160 GB. I made the destination partition 7 cylinders larger than the source with fdisk. That is a lot of bytes bigger. But yes identical is better if you know how to do that :-)
4. If you are making a copy of an entire working Fedora system make sure you change all the entries in /etc/grub.conf and /etc/fstab files to the new partitions of the copy before you try to run it.
This needs to be elaborated upon. Both "grub.conf" and "fstab" are critical files that may cause severe problems if misconfigured. Since this is a new thread, you must assume a reader is unaware of the changes you are referencing.
It is beyond the scope of this short paper.


6. Always run dd in the source computer.
Is it really wise to copy a mounted partition with a live file system? What if the file system is being written to during the copy? The advice to use a live CD (given in one of the other myriad threads on this topic) seems more prudent.
It didn't seem to make any problem. I was getting emails and sending them. They were all working normal on this computer and the destination copy runs just great.

Thank you,

Matthew Roth
InterMedia Marketing Solutions
Software Engineer and Systems Developer



--

Karl F. Larsen, AKA K5DI
Linux User
#450462 http://counter.li.org.

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